Weird shading issues. Any explanation?

[thedude22]

I'm working with someone trying to get makehuman working inside Godot game engine.

We are running into various issues, but this one is really bothering me. Can someone explain it to me?

MPFB looks great in blender.

Exporting to .glb and importing into godot does not look very good. There are many shading artifacts, some of which are shown in the picture attached.

At first I thought godot shading was just bad, but...


While trying to get animations working I uploaded the same mesh to mixamo, downloaded it as fbx, imported it back into blender and exported it back into Godot. Suddenly it looks a lot better. So it's not just a Godot looks bad thing. I can't figure out what is happening. Does anyone have any ideas?

[tomcat]

I'm working with someone trying to get makehuman working inside Godot game engine.

I work with Godot, too. The reason, apparently, is that Godot doesn't understand Blender shaders very well. The complicated way of multistage export-import simplifies shaders and the engine starts to accept them normally.

In my opinion, the most reasonable thing is to make a skin shader in the engine and assign it to MH models.

[thedude22]

We may write a skin shader at some point. But this is just a basic material with white albedo. Nothing fancy. And it's the same on the mixamo exported model, so why does that one look so much cleaner? It seems like something is wrong with the normals. We do have all the shapekeys on our mesh, unlike the mixamo mesh, but they're all at 0 so they should be the same. Maybe mixamo does their own calculation to get new normals or something. But I don't understand how there can be problems with the normals that don't show up in the same mesh in blender.

By the way I think you will like our plugin when it is ready. We are exporting all (or most) of makehuman functionality directly into the game engine. No more exporting from MH. It's all available as a custom node.

[tomcat]

But I don't understand how there can be problems with the normals that don't show up in the same mesh in blender.

MPFB has a simple textured skin. Maybe it will look good in the engine.

By the way I think you will like our plugin when it is ready. We are exporting all (or most) of makehuman functionality directly into the game engine. No more exporting from MH. It's all available as a custom node.

Yeah, the plugin looks interesting. But for my project, I need the characters to grow over time.

[punkduck]

Hi

It depends on how the program deals with the shading terminator problem. Not only godot, also unreal engine fights with that (especially since real time needs to be faster than a cycles render). I guess most of them do. I have the problem as well.
You will find some tricks in the net how to fix it besides from "more vertices, less artifacts", which is normally not really the solution for a game engine, which should be fast. So then they often use an extra "artificial smoothing".

But in the end it is an effect rather well known, even by the big ones, also the math is not new:

https://media.disneyanimation.com/techn ... inator.pdf

Greets,
punkduck

[thedude22]

But I don't understand how there can be problems with the normals that don't show up in the same mesh in blender.

MPFB has a simple textured skin. Maybe it will look good in the engine.

By the way I think you will like our plugin when it is ready. We are exporting all (or most) of makehuman functionality directly into the game engine. No more exporting from MH. It's all available as a custom node.

Yeah, the plugin looks interesting. But for my project, I need the characters to grow over time.

Yes this will be possible with our plugin as well. The shapekeys are all exported into Godot.

[thedude22]

Hi

It depends on how the program deals with the shading terminator problem. Not only godot, also unreal engine fights with that (especially since real time needs to be faster than a cycles render). I guess most of them do. I have the problem as well.
You will find some tricks in the net how to fix it besides from "more vertices, less artifacts", which is normally not really the solution for a game engine, which should be fast. So then they often use an extra "artificial smoothing".

But in the end it is an effect rather well known, even by the big ones, also the math is not new:

https://media.disneyanimation.com/techn ... inator.pdf

Greets,
punkduck

Thank you for the info. Any idea why the mixamo exported model looks so much better??? They must have recalculated normals using some smoothing algorithm, right?