Stuartw_
Sokolov's Holding Cell (Incomplete)
Here's something I stopped working on in February 2020 depicting the bribery of Sokolov with King Street Brandy. I believe I was pretty much done with the lighting and was only going to redo Havelock's and Corvo's poses and add some cigarette smoke for Havelock. I didn't know how to do the smoke at the time so my only attempt looked like chimney smoke instead (for cigarette smoke you'll want to use ribbon particles.)
I ran into a bit of a roadblock with baking the lighting and intended on waiting for GPU Lightmass to be included in the engine, so it could calculate the lighting with my video card instead of CPU. I was trying to use high enough resolution lightmaps (shadow resolution) that I couldn't see any pixelation - higher than is reasonable for an actual game - but it was getting stuck at 99% unless I lowered the resolution. I remember reading that each object uses a single CPU thread and it was likely one object was just taking way longer than everything else (probably the floor), or that I was running out of memory and Lightmass was crashing without telling me. Given how long it always took I suspected it was just crashing. GPU Lightmass did solve the problem and I could bake at whatever resolution I wanted in a fraction of the time, but then I ran into a bug with masked materials where the masked parts would just show up black. For instance, the rubbish on the ground would have black boxes around each piece of paper. I could fix this by disabling a feature called virtual textures but then only completely static lights would be supported, so I'd get no specular lighting. That means that a surface wouldn't know which direction the light was coming from, so for example a bright light wouldn't show up in a reflection on a polished surface.
Anyway, on to some other stuff. The fog being lit by the hanging lights is fake and is just a cone shaped mesh with a translucent material applied. This was the first material I made myself without a tutorial and works just like it does in the game. It's very simple stuff but it's got soft edges, a bit of noise, and fades out based on distance so I was pretty happy with that. The cable on the floor uses a simple spline system and bends a small cable model based on a curve I draw. Again, I think this is how they did it in the game because there's no model for a curvy cable in the files, just a small section of straight cable. My system was a little too simple so the section lengths are inconsistent and it floats off the floor as you can see from the shadow at the bottom.
I also learnt what trim sheets are and used them to blend the floor and walls and some other things with a dirt texture. If you zoom in you can see the dithering (grainy texture to blend it in). There's also a blending effect on certain objects like the bottom of the cage walls - again you can see a dithering effect. This effect is a bit limited and can make objects have weird lighting so it's not used as much as I'd like.
In conclusion, this is mostly done but the lighting isn't as high quality as usual. Particularly the shadows from the cage bars.
Old version for comparison. This is blurry as shit because of the type of bloom I was using.
Sokolov's Holding Cell (Incomplete)
Here's something I stopped working on in February 2020 depicting the bribery of Sokolov with King Street Brandy. I believe I was pretty much done with the lighting and was only going to redo Havelock's and Corvo's poses and add some cigarette smoke for Havelock. I didn't know how to do the smoke at the time so my only attempt looked like chimney smoke instead (for cigarette smoke you'll want to use ribbon particles.)
I ran into a bit of a roadblock with baking the lighting and intended on waiting for GPU Lightmass to be included in the engine, so it could calculate the lighting with my video card instead of CPU. I was trying to use high enough resolution lightmaps (shadow resolution) that I couldn't see any pixelation - higher than is reasonable for an actual game - but it was getting stuck at 99% unless I lowered the resolution. I remember reading that each object uses a single CPU thread and it was likely one object was just taking way longer than everything else (probably the floor), or that I was running out of memory and Lightmass was crashing without telling me. Given how long it always took I suspected it was just crashing. GPU Lightmass did solve the problem and I could bake at whatever resolution I wanted in a fraction of the time, but then I ran into a bug with masked materials where the masked parts would just show up black. For instance, the rubbish on the ground would have black boxes around each piece of paper. I could fix this by disabling a feature called virtual textures but then only completely static lights would be supported, so I'd get no specular lighting. That means that a surface wouldn't know which direction the light was coming from, so for example a bright light wouldn't show up in a reflection on a polished surface.
Anyway, on to some other stuff. The fog being lit by the hanging lights is fake and is just a cone shaped mesh with a translucent material applied. This was the first material I made myself without a tutorial and works just like it does in the game. It's very simple stuff but it's got soft edges, a bit of noise, and fades out based on distance so I was pretty happy with that. The cable on the floor uses a simple spline system and bends a small cable model based on a curve I draw. Again, I think this is how they did it in the game because there's no model for a curvy cable in the files, just a small section of straight cable. My system was a little too simple so the section lengths are inconsistent and it floats off the floor as you can see from the shadow at the bottom.
I also learnt what trim sheets are and used them to blend the floor and walls and some other things with a dirt texture. If you zoom in you can see the dithering (grainy texture to blend it in). There's also a blending effect on certain objects like the bottom of the cage walls - again you can see a dithering effect. This effect is a bit limited and can make objects have weird lighting so it's not used as much as I'd like.
In conclusion, this is mostly done but the lighting isn't as high quality as usual. Particularly the shadows from the cage bars.
Old version for comparison. This is blurry as shit because of the type of bloom I was using.