Thank you for the report! I think that happens when SexHelper doesn't remember the male/female atoms. I thought I had fixed it because it was working on my end, but I guess not. I think I know how to fix it permanently going forward, so I'll make sure that's resolved in the next version. For the time-being, it can be fixed after loading the scene as follows:
I was having trouble trying to describe it, but yes, he was indeed penetrating himself lol. Thanks, that solved it! Again, loving the scene and it's very convenient. Good job.
Haha no problem! I really appreciate your comment and your review. It's nice to know that people are enjoying it, and it's really helpful to get feedback like this because otherwise I won't know what to fix. I have many ideas for this scene so you can look forward to it getting bigger and better in the future.
Oh wow that's amazing, thank you so much for the feedback! Stuff like this really helps, as admittedly lighting is something I struggled with. Pretty much everything you've mentioned sounds like improvements.
i was expecting somethign like that already
i see. i totally missed that it was animated for each scene, because when i fiddled with the lights i did not change the scenes. i understand the problem, you need that single light to do too many things in my opinion, but it cannot look like a practical interior light and at the same time be an extension of outside light. i would suggest you approach the problem differently: create 1 or 2 practical point lights (ceiling lights, wall lights etc.) on positions that would make some sense for a practical light to be. you give them a warm colour and only animate them being switched on and off, so that at a point in time not all lights are on (mainly a question of performance). now they actually look and "feel" like cosy interior lights and they can even spill warm lights on the balcony area. their second job is to ensure that there is light where the moon-light can't reach.
here it's even more important to seperate the practical room light from effect light i think. if you have the room lights at a set colour, the blue moon light should get more obvious, because now you have a colour contrast (warm interior light versus cold moon light flooding in). of course you can't have too much interior light, or the moon light won't show at all. it's a blanace act obviously.
the weather is really impressive. i had it on random and it gave me a very hazy morning that looked very realistic and transformed that low low poly cityscape into a real place. very immersive. if i have some time i will look into it, to see how you did itIt means so much that you liked the weather effects. I was really excited when I had the idea, but I wondered if anyone would even care or find it useful lol. It was actually really fun to create the weather dial and get the system working the way I wanted.
I really appreciate your feedback, thank you so much and I'll definitely try to work on all of those points.
Ah wow yeah those sound like great ideas, I'll definitely try out those room light suggestions, that sounds like a much better implementation than what I have currently. It makes a lot of sense regarding the room light needing a reason to be there, and is probably why I was never happy with it.i was expecting somethign like that already
i see. i totally missed that it was animated for each scene, because when i fiddled with the lights i did not change the scenes. i understand the problem, you need that single light to do too many things in my opinion, but it cannot look like a practical interior light and at the same time be an extension of outside light. i would suggest you approach the problem differently: create 1 or 2 practical point lights (ceiling lights, wall lights etc.) on positions that would make some sense for a practical light to be. you give them a warm colour and only animate them being switched on and off, so that at a point in time not all lights are on (mainly a question of performance). now they actually look and "feel" like cosy interior lights and they can even spill warm lights on the balcony area. their second job is to ensure that there is light where the moon-light can't reach.
only then, i would look at the individual scenes and if needed create a light similar to your room light, but i would call it "helper" or "cheat light" and this light would only be there to help when you want to highlight a detail, a face etc. or maybe even to add some more colour to the scene. this light is not a "practical" light, as it has no realistic reasons to be there. you could also call it an effect light. because you already have your practical room lights, this light can be very dim, or very narrow. ideally you don't want the viewer to notice it being there.
as an example: the little pool outside has it's own light, but it is very dim and might not be enough, so you would add the helper light just to give a small extra highlight on a character without it showing as it's own light source. think of it as an extension of the light that is already there.
here it's even more important to seperate the practical room light from effect light i think. if you have the room lights at a set colour, the blue moon light should get more obvious, because now you have a colour contrast (warm interior light versus cold moon light flooding in). of course you can't have too much interior light, or the moon light won't show at all. it's a blanace act obviously.
if you want more colour at sunset, sunrise, i would try to just animate the sunlight to be even more red. same for the blue moon light, if it's not blue enough already.
so in short: just a suggestion of course:
use one or two room light as practical light in a "motivated" manner. make them point light, give them a warm/warm-white colour. switch them on and off as needed, but don't animate them further. they belong to the apartment furniture now... (of yourse you can move them to suit your needs, but they should still look like ceiling or wall lights. i have looked if there are any practical light in vam, but they are all a bit rubbish, so better just use the "invisible light")
to get more colour in the scene use more red on the sunlight (or more blue on the night light, but i think blue is fine already)
use an effect light to highlight areas or give colour accents, but don't let the light itself get obvious. use it as an extension of light sources that are alerady contributing to the scene. if you find that a scene is still to dim, check if you can "switch" on a second ceiling light to help or maybe move a ceiling light closer. making the effect light brighter should be your last resort, because it is not motivated and should not be obvious to the viewer.
the weather is really impressive. i had it on random and it gave me a very hazy morning that looked very realistic and transformed that low low poly cityscape into a real place. very immersive. if i have some time i will look into it, to see how you did it
you are welcome. again just take it as inspiration. my experience comes from real life cinematography, but that does not always translate perfectly to 3d graphics...
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That was a really interesting read, thank you! I've watched a few videos which mentioned similar stuff but it makes a lot more sense to hear you apply it to my scene. Animating the moonlight is something I didn't think of, I'll definitely give it a try to see how it looks.i'm happy to help. i'm not motivated to do a proper scene myself (i think i would get bored or frustrated with all the animations and scripting), so i tend to play around witht what others have created.
be careful with the images i posted, they are indeed your scene without significant changes and only use 3 lights maximum (mostly two light only, as the effect light is only used on the mirror scene (light bounce fromt he mirror) and the standing outside kamasutra scene (light from streetlevel shining upwards to give somedefinition on her face and interesting shadows on the bodies) BUT i had the day/night cycle stopped and for every picture deliberately aimed the sun / moon light for best effect and also moved the ceiling light around a bit for optimal effect. you don't have that luxury, because you decided to go the ambitious route with the day/night cycle
on that occasion i realized how difficult it is to get that cinematic lighting with a day/night cycle (but i still like the idea of it - it just complicates things a lot
some ideas on how you could cheat a little bit:
-> cheat light (described already - as a last resort. it's also a nightmare to properly tune, because it would have to change per scene and depending on time of day). if you increase the shadows on the directional lights, you'll need this for every day scene to simulate light bouncing back from the wall in the back (in my pictures i did not do that, because the ceiling light was enough to brighten the shadows, but this is to some extend what i critizised with you room light (a practical light being missused as an effect light. in this case the effect was exactly the same, but you could argue that it would have been cleaner from a workflow perspective to switch of the ceiling light at sunrise and bring in the effect light to simulate the light bounce)
-> cheat with the moon light: since you don't have the direction animated, you could maybe aim it differently for every scene. of curse not realistic, but it might make things much easier. with this you could easily get the look from my pictures - in the night scenes at least - because you could aim the moon light per scene and contrast it with the ceiling light without needing a third light (i only used third light for outside kamasutra and mirror scene).
another important thing is global illumination. i don't have any definitive advise here, as this is something that works quite different in reality and even works differently in every graphics engine. i'll just tell you what i did, as a suggestion to try out, but i think this is not only a question of style and aesthetics, but mainly a question of workflow, especially if you do day/night.
in short, i did not want to bother too much with GI, because it is a headache when you cannot dynamically change the skybox in a dynamic scene imho.
i however needed some GI very badly, because i increased (maxed) the shadow strength on the directional light, which does not work on the cityscape without GI (compeltely black shadows on the cityscape) , so i set GI to default values and from there decreased it as much as i could, only looking at the cityscape with sun coming from behind the buildings (on the scene itself you can always light up shadows with your practical light, or cheat light, but you don't want to bother with that on the cityscape environment)
you could argue that it would be realistic to decrease the GI dynamically at night, which is true, but i found that it did not make that big of a difference, so i did not fiddle with it any further.
i did however use the camera exposure slider a lot and this might be a good idea to animate with the day/night cycle. i tried to somewhat mimic a pbr (physical baased rendering) workflow, which means that the sun is significantly brighter than the moon (i think i used only double or triple values, so not really physically correct) and then at night i increased camera exposure to get the brightness where i needed it. why would you do this?
only reason here would be that the ceiling lights would have somewhat realistic brightness compared to outside light. they have always the same brightness value, but as the sun goes down they appear brighter, because the exposure gets up (hooray for realism!).
if you only do light for a single picture it does not matter if you change brightness values on lights or camera exposure, but when you have a dynamic scene, it's cleaner to keep brightness levels of natural light (sun/moon) and practicals (ceiling light etc) in a somewhat realistic relation and control brightness with the camera exposure slider.
can't think of any more. hope that helps.
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)Ah of course yeah, I'll definitely keep it simple at least to start with. But at least now I have an idea of what good lighting can look like, so I can aim to reproduce something similar but in a manageable way within my workflow.
only one little note: glad you like the last image, but remember that it's probably a bit too complex lighting to pull off in a dynamic scene without going crazy (technically possible of course, but even for that one shot i had to tweak the values multiple time. doing this kind of light for the interactive, dynamic scene seems like a nightmare to me
it's probably better to aim for a 2+1 light approach (like in the first batch of images: main light, fill light, and effect if needed). if you get this working without going crazy, you can add more of course.
imagine the last image without the painting spot light: it's the same lighting as in the images before. of course you'd need to completely rearrange it, because the painting is a big part of the composition, but technically the scene as a whole would still be well lit.
Hey no problem! Thanks for the kind words. Yeah so the instructions to change the possess button are in the ReadMe but I'll copy-paste it here:Hey man first off I really enjoy your scene, thanks for putting the effort into it and letting everybody enjoy it!
Secondly, sorry if this is a bit of a noob question, but I was wondering if it is possible to remap the possess button to something on the oculus controller, or if it is stuck to a button on KB/M.
Also, not sure what is happening in this position
. Did you try pressing the reposition button? And does that happen every time you swap to that position?Yeah it is consistent in bugging out, always does the same thing in the screenshot, all other positions work fine for meFor your screenshot, I'm not too sure what's happening either
Okay thanks for the report! Yeah after VaM 1.20 some of the poses which were working fine started having this issue. I fixed it for the others by automatically turning collision off then back on again during the pose loads. I guess I forgot to do it for the bed position.
