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After finally finishing the playfield texture redraw, it’s time to tackle those all so important but ah, so difficult to nail, insert lights.
IMO a nice insert lighting is really, really important to get right to create an illusion of a real, mechanical pinball table. Blinking and pulsating lights are a trademark feature and one of the main visual things in a traditional pinball machine. Alas, it’s also something 95% (numbers from my butt) of tables don’t fare too hot. So here’s a quick look how I make them look a bit better:
So, here’s the two fish inserts we are going to be fixing today. This is the starting point: (all images can be clicked to see it full size)
As you can see, it’s bright and you get the feeling there is a light. But does it feel like the light is under the table and shines through the decal sticker? Not really. Changing to my new playfield texture doesn’t make it look much better. Sure, it’s cleaner, but the light itself is still a bit tough to look at:
So, what should we do to make it look a bit better, other than a higher quality texture?
First I will make a duplicate texture from my redraw PF texture and rename it… say inserts.png. I will edit the areas that shouldn’t pass light through to be very dark, while the parts that should pass some light are edited to medium darkness. Parts that should pass all the light through are not touched. After a bit of drawing, testing and fixing things, the new inserts texture ends up looking like this: (notice how fish scale areas that should pass light are left untouched, and the mesh like decal around them, that shouldn’t pass light, is made much darker)
This method will remove the common issue with insert lighting where light shines through the whole area with maximum brightness. This is a perfect way to make white text over insert lighting not suffer from over exposure and blooming or smoothing out the insert light edges that don’t have a clear outline.
After making the texture, I will go to the editor and change the shape of the insert object to better reflect the real one. With the new insert texture in use, this is much easier than usual, as I don’t need to micro manage the shape to go around certain areas I don’t want to get lit. When I’m satisfied with the shape, I just need to alter lighting settings in the editor for the insert to look perfect. In this case, I’m after a traditional, warm incandescent lighting, so I set the color to orange. I also use a pretty high falloff value to have that nice highlight shining through:
And here’s the finished version – notice how the bright center part of the light barely shines through the fins and looks spot on realistic. Also notice the yellow parts of the scales on the left fish that don’t let the light through fully:
And here’s a quick comparison with the original to better see the difference:
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Lower playfield starts to look nice and clean:
(don’t mind the fuzzy TALE TOLD inserts, they are fixed later)
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The four big fishes are very important to get right, as they are the main “hero element” of the playfield and also incorporates very complex mesh-like decals over the insert lights. For these reasons, they need to be repainted extra carefully. It’ll look great and make my life easier when making insert lighting later. (click images to see full size and also to flip back and forth to see the difference)
BEFORE:
AFTER:
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I just hope he is able to lure Bord and Roth to help him on finalizing it. Have a strong feeling that it is his plan.
Let’s see what happens after we get the MB done… ;)
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Sorry for being monotonous, but today I’ve been repainting the playfield again. But I can assure, the work I’m doing is also monotonous. It’s a huge undertaking, but the low quality PF texture is one of the main reasons why this table isn’t looking too hot… so it just has to be done. :)
Today I’ve changed green/yellow two tones to a full color gradient. It breaks my heart to lose those originally beautiful two tones as it’s a huge part of the visual style of that era and I personally love the look. It’s just something that needs to be done to get a clean and smooth looking table.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
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The middle part of the playfield is full of small detail and is very time consuming to fix. Lot’s of freehand drawing and referencing from images online. Especially the hand net was really a pain in the butt to do, but absolutely necessary to nail because it’s an insert light so making it now as perfect as possible will make my life easier when designing lights. More on that later. Here’s a quick image of the area before…Â (click the images to full size)
…and after:
EDIT: ooops, just noticed I forgot the sock stripes. :)
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I’ve never done any 3d-modeling, always been a 2d guy only. I wish I had your skill set bord, I’d love to be able to do what you do.
Anyways, fascinating videos. You have kind of ASRM thing going with your calm commentary. :)
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I had no idea there was much of a difference between jpeg, png, …. teach us o wise one!
Well yeah, there is a difference, but to be honest, a jpg with it’s compression set to a minimum is good enough for pretty much anything regarding textures like this. It’s just that often (like in this case) the compression levels have been cranked to an unnecessarily high levels – and that will ruin the texture. Also, compressing it again and again will make it worse every single time the texture is saved.
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I just hope this doesn’t slow down your other monster project??
Not really. I’m pretty much done with MB (for now). At the moment it’s just waiting for a new mesh playfield from @bord and that’ll probably happen some time next week. After that it will go to @rothbauerw’s physics and code factory to really get a new life.
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Do you use a drawing tablet or a mouse? I find the mouse sometimes feels like it gets in the way…
Just mouse. I’m pretty used to do high detail stuff with mouse. I’ve started with Deluxe Paint and old school game pixel art and animation more than 25 years ago. :)
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Modding is great, I do it all the time and almost all the tables I own are more or less modded to my own taste… but I’m not putting them all online for others to play. I’ve only released officially a few that I can say are high enough quality, a definite improvement over the original and something I can stand behind the end result. I have my own modded version of pretty much all the tables Bigus has released but with much more substantial improvements that are still never ever going see the light of day… they are just for my own use and not going to be uploaded online ever. There needs to be restraint on what to make a public release.
That said, It’s nice to see Bigus’ enthusiasm. You just need to put your time and energy to one perfect release instead of making few small changes to every table you have and release them all online.
It’s not right for the original author (even if you have a permission) and we’ll drown in the sea of dozens of indifferent versions that are not an absolute improvement, but just your personal preference.
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Private message sent to Schreibi34
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@Schreibi34, GI-on and GI-off textures are ever so slightly (pixel or two) different size so that when the lights blink on/off, the whole playfield jerks back and forth the length of a couple of pixels horizontally. To be sure, I exported the two textures and checked with PhotoShop layers, and indeed, the textures are not quite the same size…
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Thank you Schreibi and the rest of the team! Amazing looking table, simply flawless. I’ve never played this before, so I’m sure I’ll get hundreds of hours of entertainment out of this. Many thanks!
…uh, speaking of flawless. I think there’s issue with the LUT selection: no matter what you choose in the script to be the default, the LUT used is the 1:1 one when you start the table.
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This table has a few 4k flasher images (fl_xx). You can probably greatly reduce these without much negative visual impact as they are blurry blobs of light anyway. We ended up using smaller flasher images in Flintstones because the 4k ones were slowing things down too much.The F11 FPS screen actually shows you what percent is script vs GPU. I don’t see much in this script that could be causing slowness.
Yeah, resizing flashers was what I did the second I realized that disabling AA wasn’t enough. But it didn’t help either. Disabling widows defender was no good either. All other tables run locked 165hz on my system.
On the other news, @Knorr, you should probably rise f126a and f119 so they don’t cut the signs like this:
(Click image to see it full size)
EDIT: ok, so half the resolution I tried earlier clearly wasn’t small enough to make a difference. I deleted the flasher textures to have a quick test and it did actually improve things quite a bit. Still not perfect, but playable. @Knorr, could you add a performance option with considerably smaller flasher textures or at least optimize them a bit?… I can’t be the only was suffering from this.
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@Knorr @ClarkKent, after trying this out, it’s even more glorious than in the screenshots. Simply amazing, amazing talent!
On the negative side, this table puts my GTX1070 to it’s knees like nothing else on Vpinball. I’m playing @ 165hz and in certain situations my fps drops as low as 120 and the fluctuating frame rate makes the game seem jerky and not so fun to play. Disabling AA has a small effect, but no where near enough. I also tried to resize some textures to half the size and set some primitives to static rendering, but the performance issues doesn’t seem to be connected that much to GFX and the general structure how the table is built seems quite optimized and efficient. Any ideas how to smooth the performance on this? Could it be something on the script/code side?
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Whoa! It looks so real it’s unreal… If I’m making any sense. ? Can’t wait to test this!
Thanks you so much for your efforts, Knorr and Clark Kent!
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WoW thanks for the great update Skitso! Thank you for the great work you always do. The whole community is just amazing. Without you, I could never have made my dream of owning a pinball machine come true.
I really appreciate feedback like this. Thank you.
This table for example has been downloaded over 6000 times. Only few dozen people has managed to press the like or thanks button, even fewer has replied something nice. I suppose majority of people downloading these tables just don’t realize just how mind boggingly huge amount of work, passion, skill, talent, determination and time from multiple people these projects require.
So thanks for stopping by everyone, and saying thanks. It means a lot.
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No new upload. Just fixed the wrong version number in the description.
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