A Complete Guide to Full Scene Rendering in Garry's Mod

[Ott]

r_flashlightdrawfrustum 1 doesn't seem to be working for me. Poster_soft doesn't turn on the hardlights either (yes, the lamp is on).

[Vioxtar]

The drawfrutsum not working puzzles me, it should work for every projected texture, it's a source feature. The only thing I can guess is you may have a setting which disables (or partially disables) projected textures, perhaps try this on a clean install?

[Ott]

My graphics settings are on minimum, maybe I need to turn shadow quality up.

[Crazy Knife]

I thought I'd provide a dumbed down summary how to make the soft shadows work.

Spawn the soft lamp, right click on it > edit properties > and then put in settings similar to those here:

[IMG]http://www.wduwant.com/index_uploads/uploads/5dd4644b9f26.jpg[/IMG]

Then type poster_soft 1 in console, it will have the same effect as a screenshot only all your shadows will look like SFM.

[editline]22nd May 2016[/editline]

Absolutely no jaggies, silky smooth kind of stuff.

[georgeebizzle]

snip

[Vioxtar]

zfighting

Create a new lua file in Steam\steamapps\common\GarrysMod\garrysmod\lua\autorun\client called znear.lua, throw this inside save & close

local cvar = CreateClientConVar("r_nearz_override", "-1", false, false, "Override the NearZ value for rendering. -1 to disable override.")

cvars.AddChangeCallback("r_nearz_override",function()
    cvars.RemoveChangeCallback("r_nearz_override", "nearz_define_calcview")

    local oldCV = GAMEMODE.CalcView
    function GAMEMODE.CalcView(...)
        local ret = oldCV(...)

        local nearz = cvar:GetFloat()
        if nearz <= 0 then return ret end

        ret.znear = nearz
        return ret
    end
end, "nearz_define_calcview")

type in console r_nearz_override and a number higher than 0, the higher it is the more of these artifacts are fixed

[RikugunTaisaD]

I hate to sound really noobish, thou i am new to Soft Lamp, but how do i use this for Lighting scenes? cany anyone provide examples? thank you.

[georgeebizzle]

any idea why soft_poster_aa does this and makes it look all strange where as when i do it without the aa its fine?

[QUOTE][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/cm4KalY.png [/IMG][/QUOTE]

[Vioxtar]

it's the downside of poster_soft_aa, use a lower brightness lamp and colors should be good

[georgeebizzle]

iv just done a larger poster_soft instead then scaled it down in ps

[Caste]

playing around with soft lamps and oh boy I got the shadow stripping, nothing helps. If I'm right it has something to do with HDR, if it's ON then the solution of putting editors below the map helps a bit, if it's OFF then that solution doesn't work.
Also, any ideas why [B]poster_soft or poster_soft_aa[/B] cause picture quality issue ?

[t]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11219057/poster-17-01-16 01-26-31.png[/t]

Another question, what is focal point distance and how does it work ?

EDIT: choosing some other surface shapes helps to solve the problem with low picture quality.

[Crazy Knife]

[QUOTE=Caste;51675557]playing around with soft lamps and oh boy I got the shadow stripping, nothing helps. If I'm right it has something to do with HDR, if it's ON then the solution of putting editors below the map helps a bit, if it's OFF then that solution doesn't work.
Also, any ideas why [B]poster_soft or poster_soft_aa[/B] cause picture quality issue ?

[t]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11219057/poster-17-01-16 01-26-31.png[/t]

Another question, what is focal point distance and how does it work ?

EDIT: choosing some other surface shapes helps to solve the problem with low picture quality.[/QUOTE]

Do not use poster_soft_aa, it screws up brightness and stuff. I just use poster_soft 2 or 3 , you will have jaggies, but as you resise back to 1920x1080 they all disappear.

Don't remember what focal point distance is. Is that value closer to 0? If so, just leave it alone.

Here's just one thing you wanna modify with soft lamps when you spawn it, and that is the

[B][I][U]"SURFACE RADIUS"[/U][/I][/B]

0 = regular sharp lamp
100+ = more soft shadows
500+ super big foggy shadows etc.

Make sure that when you spawn your lamp, hold C right click it and "edit properties" so that you can modify everything like in the Q menu. It's much more advisable to do it this way.

[Vioxtar]

[QUOTE=Caste;51675557]
Another question, what is focal point distance and how does it work[/QUOTE]

Focal distance marks the distance of the point travelling on the normal of the soft lamp towards which all sub lamps of said soft lamp aim to. At 0, all sub lamps will match their direction with the primary soft lamp. Try and turn on 4 sub lamps during gameplay and play with the focal distance parameter to see what's actually happening.

The low quality in the outputs is a product of information loss (caused by stressing the bit capacity of float point textures which soft lamps utilize to capture a lot of light information in one texture). To avoid this, see that no other non-softlamp light sources are in your frame pre-capture, that fog is disabled, that your lamps' brightness value isn't very high, and that your surface resolution parameter isn't very high as well (the two latter ones will likely max out the storage capacity of the FP textures).

[QwertyTSecond]

I'm stuck on this problem, my screenshots are coming out completely black, is there some critical step I'm missing? Render time is usually 240 seconds, which seems a bit long as well.

[Vioxtar]

Screenshots coming out black are usually because the HeavyLight checkbox isn't toggled on your lamp, meaning it's not going to be a part of the final render, but the 240 second render time suggests this isn't the case, so I'm not sure. Perhaps upload an image of your settings window/scene so I can get a better idea.

[QwertyTSecond]

Thanks for the quick response!
I've set up a quick test, here's what I'm aiming for plus settings:

[thumb]http://i.imgur.com/L6579EH.jpg[/thumb]

And here's what poster_soft 1 gives:

[thumb]http://i.imgur.com/4iuX1Jo.png[/thumb]

Checking in GIMP it is just a single black value. I think the 240 second render time was just me trying to put the settings too high, the values in the first image gave a render time of 9.7859440930001 seconds.

[Vioxtar]

Can't say I know what's causing it :/ What's your brightness and offset values?

[QwertyTSecond]

Brightness was 2.02, and offset was 6.04 0.00 0.00.
So far I've tried tweaking all the settings in soft lamps, most of the video settings in gmod, and updated my video drivers, but I'm still getting the same results. I also tried extracting the addon and installing it manually, but no luck there either.
At the moment, when rendering is taking place I have two progress bars, one for soft lamps (x out of 1201 for the above settings), and one for poster (x out of 2 for the above settings). The rest of the screen is black, other than a brief flash when the poster progress bar goes from 1/2 to 2/2. Is this what I'm meant to see?
I'll try a clean install of gmod later, and see if there's any addon conflicts.

[Vioxtar]

Did you try maxing out your brightness value? Try doing that via the right click menu, see if its still 100% black. Later in an hour or two I might be able to log on, and inspect it more closely with p2p if you want.

[QwertyTSecond]

Maxed brightness is giving the same results as well. Thinking back, I get a similar problem with sdof rendering complete black (which is why I never use it), and bokeh dof failing as well. I suspect it's something to do with running on ubuntu. Thanks for all your help, but I'm going to concede defeat on this one for now.

[TheNebeskyMuz]

[t]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/92726674956897121/2713D85A2BAD026EB7A32B8460C65805CBE244B7/?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=95&fit=inside|2048:1151&composite-to%3D%2A%2C%2A%7C2048%3A1151&background-color=black[/t] Very good guide, my test work just.