hey i want to achieve that softimage3d look in unreal engine specifically the look of silent hill cutscenes (which were made in softimage3d )
i did some deep dives into cinematography and it seems the blurry and soft look is achievable with diffuse lens. is it possible to replicate diffuse lens to ue camera . if not then how to achieve that look
and then how to make the rendering look old like in softimage3d
(sorry for bad english)
bumping this
wdym diffuse? blurry? just render at low resolution and blow it up with bilinear filtering. that’s how old psx videos are upscaled. that’s how you reproduce it.
if you mean diffuse lighting… just render it realtime with no baked lighting and gi and don’t use any ambient lighting like skylights. that’s how you get old pitch black shadows.
i downloaded the old softimage3d and as it seems its not only abt ambient lights and baked lighting
i atleast concluded through some of the testing renders i did in it that first of all theres no indirect light , they used scanline materials using shaders like phong lambert blinn
but how to replicate this nd how do i start
Hey!
If I understand what you’re trying to accomplish correctly, you need a way to replace unreal’s default lighting with some custom solution that provides that softimage3d look? Messing with the actual engine lighting code is opening a big can of worms, but since you say there’s no indirect lighting involved, implementing this in a material would probably be doable. The way I’d do it would be:
Create a material and set the shading model to Unlit.
Create a Material Parameter Collection that holds all the relevant data for all of the lights in the scene.
Implement the custom Blinn-Phong-style lighting model in the Unlit material using the lighting data from the Material Parameter Collection.
If you need advice on how to actually implement said lighting model, I can point you in the direction of some good resources.
lambert is just a default diffuse term. like half lambert with it’s signature title. blinn and blinn phong are specular terms. iirc blinn is per vertex specular and phong is per pixel. in relation to ue it just uses different scales and exponents of gloss or roughness, which is a basicly the inversion of the old gloss formula.
most of this still works the same way in ue5. just mess around with specular and roughness. don’t use textures for those, just values. and like i wrote before. just dump every ambient light and just put simple lights in the scene. use lowres textures and simple bilinear filtering. you get old looking visuals.
this is the cheapest i can make this look.
it is basicly lambert diffuse, shadow maps, and scuffed up old looking specular. for the blurriness i lowered the screen percentage to 50 and switched to fxaa to get the kinda look of it. it’s not rocket science, just a lil bit of artistry.
hey i think ur in the right path to achieve that softimage3d look
but something still feels wrong or missing
idk how to explain it but surfaces felt softer, but sub surface scattering wasnt a thing back then
and lastly since fmvs were rendered in a lower resolution (640x480) then upscaled how may i do that without getting pixelated look ( rendering an old resolution camera into a texture then scaling the texture as UI for the main camera doesnt seem right because im not downscaling only for the look but also to increase performance)
