Material Roughness Adjustment Jumped Too Fast

1

Hello,

I want to ask about the material adjustment in Shapespark. Whenever I want to apply roughness, it is really hard since the difference between 0 and 0.01 is way too much, which is unrealistic. It should be gradually getting rough.

Is it some kind of optimization or bug? Because I really need a soft roughness.

Thank you.

2

0 roughness is a special case that uses higher resolution (6x512x512 pixels) light probe for a mirror-like reflection effect.

Any other setting uses a blurred light probes, with resolutions starting from 6x128x128 pixels down to 6x1x1 pixels.

3

I was wondering if maybe in future you could add possibility of manually choosing the light probe resolution?
As mentioned previously there is a huge jump between 0 and 0.01 roughness. Would be really useful to be able to use something in between. I understand that it would affect the performance, but it could still be useful for the smaller scenes.
Also, would it possible to re-calculate the lightprobes on material change? Or may be add a function to the API. When you have a mirror surface and change the material, the material in the mirror is unchanged, which is quite problematic.
I hope there is a “yes” to at least one of the requests :slightly_smiling_face:
Thanks!

2 Likes
4

Mirror light probe resolution can be adjusted with:

<script>
  WALK.LIGHT_PROBE_MIRROR_SIZE = 512; 
</script>

512 is the default value. The value needs to be a power of two, so you can increase it to 1024 or 2048.
Keep in mind that memory required by a mirror light probe is: 6 * resolution * resolution * 4;
So 512 resolution lightprobe uses 6.2MB of GPU memory, with 1024 it is: 25MB and with 2048: 100MB per light probe.

We are experimenting with making a change between roughness 0 and 0.01 lees abrupt, and see good results. We will include this in the next release.

1 Like
5

Thanks, Jan.
WALK.LIGHT_PROBE_MIRROR_SIZE works great. Is it possible to recalculate light probs after the scene is loaded?
I’m excited to see the next update!

6

The just released Shapespark 1.17.2 includes the roughness adjustment improvement mentioned by @jan: the reflections are sharper in the [0; 0.1] roughness range.