/3/ - 3DCG

[Anonymous No.642680]

I'm a huge fan of nintendo's games. but one thing always really confused me. why do they think that throwing a camera dependent rim shader to simulate rim lighting makes a game look good?

ever since the wii/ds games they seem to have a massive hard on for renders with rim lighting. and from a design prospective, rim lighting is almost always distracting or flattens the image.

like pic related, there are some highlights on the characters' shoes that make no fucking sense, even if you wanted to try to say they were bounce light or environmental light. like what gives? why won't they just let the light naturally highlight the forms of the models?

[Anonymous No.642681]

>>642680
Because it's an easy effect to do in realtime on limited console hardware and adds a little pop to your shader. The art directors there must like the effect, or at least like it better than whatever alternatives their team has proposed. The end.

[Anonymous No.642682]

it was seen as modern aesthetic of the platform during the heyday. I view it as an extension of the actual Wii system menu where the buttons and UI animations have similar highlights.

[Anonymous No.642684]

its supposed to highlight the thing you are looking at, perhaps. stylized character are not meant to have realistic highlights

[Anonymous No.642689]

>>642680
It's better than a glowing outline or whatever

[Anonymous No.642696]

>>642680
Once place I worked at told me the reason they put a rim shader on all the characters was to make them clearly visible even in shadow and as an outline to make them "pop" from the background.
Probably the same reason nintendo do it too.

[Anonymous No.642699]

>>642680
>why won't they just let the light naturally highlight the forms of the models?
Have you ever worked with any realtime lighting? Natural rimlights from global illumination and/or multiple light sources is WAY more expensive in realtime than a simple shader rimlight. Everything in realtime is basically unnatural trickery, rather than 100% accuracy you go for the closest looking thing that's fast enough to do.

[Anonymous No.642916]

>>642680
These are Nintendo consoles you're talking about. Much more efficient to do these shader tricks than to bother rendering actual lighting.

Hell, most games aren't even 1080p on the Switch. Not worth sacrificing performance for something nobody will notice.

[Anonymous No.642936]

It's a really cheap effect to calculate in real time makes the characters stand out from the background really easily.
The Mario on the right, his shoe won't get lost in the shadow and blend in with the roof from a zoomed out perspective, you'll still see his full silhouette.

They really hammed it up with games like Mario Galaxy and Zelda WindWaker to use cheap shaders for really dramatic effects, and it's stuck because they use cheap hardware and usually run really responsive games, and it gives better results than emulating realism on hardware that pales in comparison to the competition.

[Anonymous No.642954]

>>642916
You can't sacrifice performance if you don't have it in the first place

[Anonymous No.643288]

>>642954
Can you please take the stupidity back to /v/

[Anonymous No.644549]

>>642680
I can stand the rim shading, it's their way of trying to make the visuals more cartoony I imagine.
What grinds my gears is the amount of fucking bloom they've been using in games since the Wii U, especially the Mario ones.

[Anonymous No.644567]

>>644549
>more cartoony
I'd say it's actually to make it look more realistic. It's a cheap way to fake a fresnel effect and it works fine in bright environments if it's done right.

[Anonymous No.644644]

>>642680
Because it reads better in motion to a player.

[Anonymous No.644659]

>>642680
Nothing wrong with it, but they overdo it imo. It's clearly a conscious stylistic choice though, so you might as well be asking "why do people like things"

[Anonymous No.644788]

>>642680
Because the Fresnel shader separates the characters from the background. That's a basic principle from comic book art. Clarity takes precedence over aesthetics.

[Anonymous No.644990]

>>642680
They obviously want to separate Mario from the background. It's the equivalent of black text with a white outline.

[Anonymous No.647753]

>>642680

Because fresnel in the shader is cheap as hell compared to realtime pixel rim light (if you have vertex lights and no shaders, those are cheaper still but dependent on your model geometry, see image), and because rim lighting has been used forever in paintings/film/comics as a way to differentiate characters from the background, so over generations, people as a group have associated it with being 'correct' visually even though you rarely see this in real life situations. It's just like 3 point lighting- thats the standard in film, so when we see it in CGI/games it looks 'correct'- even though its not realistic.

[Anonymous No.647756]

>>647753
i've done some basic painting, and surprisingly most real life subjects have some kind of rim lighting indeed

[Anonymous No.647763]

>>647756

True, but its usually reflected light. Rim lighting is a bit different in that it is an aesthetic choice.

[Anonymous No.647766]

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf

Some bits on rim here

[Anonymous No.648342]

>>642681
>Because it's an easy effect to do in realtime on limited console hardware and adds a little pop to your shader. The art directors there must like the effect, or at least like it better than whatever alternatives their team has proposed. The end.
/thread