Learn how to make beautiful trees, fluffy grass, and sweeping landscapes with my brand new Unreal Engine for Beginners course: bit.ly/3k5xCNH Patreon: / stylizedstation
Visually and audibly the game is stunning and on a whole other level from typical games, just unfortunate that it incorporates anime and gambling (and children 0-0)
Fun fact, this is one of THE most important effects for realism, but for a time it was annoyingly technical to setup on materials. You had to set it up through code or a few extra steps to get it working. People quickly made solutions that you could easily integrate the effect without technical knowledge, and then later on, softwares followed suit. Now if you start up anything with a metal/roughness shader like Blender, Maya, Unreal, etc, the shader calculates fresnel from the start. That’s why even if you just drop in a simple color and play with the values, you can get SOMETHING decent. Obviously you need more detail and texture to get it super realistic, but fresnel pulls A LOT of weight
Another very important effect for realism is subsurface scattering. Without subsurface scattering, organic objects look like plastic. With subsurface scattering, it looks correct.
damn here i was thinking "wow you must be old if you lived in an era when fresnel had to be added with patch jobs" and then i remembered the old PBR workflow for blender needed creating your own fresnel node setup to then drive the mix factor.......... and realised I'm old too.
Surprised this video didn't mention Super Mario Galaxy; it feels like SMG based almost its entire aesthetic around fresnal shading and as far as I'm aware was the first AAA game that went for that soft shaded fresnal look.
I'm pretty sure Mario galaxy doesn't use any fresnal shading at all. It uses some clever tricks that kind of look like it but not real fresnal. Edit: went and checked out some videos to double check I wasn't spreading misinformation. Mario galaxy uses displacement maps to give a fresnal like appearance but not a true fresnal shader.
Nope, SMG was definitely not the first one to do it. My money's on two of the 2004's big-3 triple-A PC exclusives, Far Cry 1 and Half-Life 2. Latter especially did stellar job with its water shaders, and still looks amazing to this day. It's just bizarre how we've gone backwards in terms of water reflections and refractions since then.
@@Reecetafarian When it comes to graphics shaders, it doesn't matter what the algorithm used to create the effect is. Whatever techniques are used, the result is a high level of reflectivity on geometry that is at a shallow angle of incidence. This is the end result of the Fresnel effect and it is used extensively in Mario Galaxy, being it's signature look. Mario Galaxy was not the first to use it, nor was it the last, but the Fresnel effect is very much a part of its graphics. Displacement maps are not responsible for this type of effect, it is similar to bump mapping or parallax mapping, adding geometric detail to a surface.
Just saw the intro and noticed that when your channel name pops up it's typo'd as "Sylized Station" without the T in Stylized. Very stylish anyway but thought you might want to know!
I would love to see more stuff on how devs actually optimize their games using various techniques. I have actually learnt the meaning and use of a lot of techniques thanks to you. Hopefully you can make a video on this someday, if it's an interesting enough topic.
I've always just called these "rim parameters." Another thing they're good for is simulating materials that look more dense at grazing angles, like sheer fabric (where the strands overlap more) and powdery coatings like dust or sand.
*TL;DR:* you know that glow effect around the edges of a 3D character (Mario, enemies, when healing/damaged)? Yeah, that's made possible to calculate by Fresnel's equations. It gives you all the edges that are pointing away from the camera, sort of like the opposite of the Normal vector.
Another application for Fresenel shaders in either a realistic (though more often) a stylized context using that edge glow principal is to give an object an iridescent or pearlesecent sheen, where different parts of the object (the edge vs center of mass) have their hues/colors change based on the viewing angle, sorta like what's shown on the thumbnail or the overwatch friend or foe effect. Fresnel alone usually doesn't make a super convincing or accurate simulation of this, but it can work in a pinch if your art style is already stylized or if it's one part of other shaders and effects used ob the object. A rather convincing implementation of this is, IIRC, the iridescence on some Elite and Grunt armor in Halo Reach (most obvious on the Spec Ops ranks, where there's a base maroon color, but a pale green sheen on it) is achieved this way.
good stuff! Interesting to note that in genshins case in particular it’s (also) using the depth buffer to determine if the landscape element in question is backing to an open area, since the rim lighting only appears on edges backing to a large space, such as the sky - That way not every single rock face or foliage card that angles away from the camera has rim lighting, and it’s only the ones that would make sense to have - instead of putting rim lighting on a rock that backs to …. another rock lol
Whoa, until now I just thought of fresnel as gradient on the edges shader. But this new knowledge is so much more useful and I can see how I can use it for my projects
Fresnel hilariously, is also a fun design in art. And I read a few artists and comments who critique drawing those light edges over smoother actual light effects. It's also an easy way to add detail. For example in Unity's shader graph you have a fresnel node. The basic one like you can see fades inwards, but by adding it to the power of 2 or 3. Basically fresnel squared etc, you harden the edge of the fresnel light. So fresnel squared becomes a much more stylized look similar to BOTW where you see the shadow just off immediately.
For all its (gacha-related) flaws, Genshin manages to have some of the best shaders for characters and landscapes in any anime-style game I've played. Only one I've played that tops it is FighterZ, but that's more of a curated experience with preset camera angles and perspective tricks (not a bad thing, it plays to its strength of being a 2D fighting game to great effect).
@@GreenTeaTheTea Have you ever played a game that isn't gambling with anime ? Imagine defending Genshin fucking Impact by calling Guilty Gear of all games bad, heck I didn't even say anything bad about Genshin. Guess the people calling Genshin fans toxic are right after all 🤷
Another thing why the Fresnel effect matters - it occurs a lot in the real world yet we don't notice it. So when trying to add more believability to your scene it's important to include this effect in your shading. In blender principled BSDF already includes it, but it can be more beneficial to add it on top
I think the souls games also use Fresnel for the phantoms and such? It was always the most stand out effect I saw in a video game for the longest time and very interesting to me.
Wow, this is amazing! The way game artist use the physical phenomenon to achieve a artistic goal. The example of Valorant’s characters is my favorite. What a creative, practical and at the same time very artistically driven way to use this technique. Thanks for that! Great stuff
I learned about The Fresnel Effect while learning PBR and Substance Painter back in 2017 when I first started using Substance for my texturing workflow and It really is very interesting..!!!
so thats why its used, i have created dragon ball style special effects on blender and the fresnel shader is used a lot to achieve that glow as you say and while i knew that it was used to create that separation and glow effect on the VFX i never understood why that was, why it was named fresnel specifically or why it had that effect
I think one of the best games to show this that you might've forgotten is Risk of Rain 2. If anyone reading this wants to see a great example of how much millage you can get with Fresnel, look to that game.
I always thought that any highlights around an edge were considered cell shading, guess not, very cool stuff, very excited to look into it more and hopefully apply it to my own VFX
I think the first time I've noticed the effect of this shader was in Half-Life 2. It was one of the first, if not first game where strength of the reflections was dependant on the angle you look at the water. There been lots and lots of games from mid 2000s onwards that used this effect to highlight objects, provide effects on characters or make other effects to stand out more. I think first game that was strongly reliant on this effect to highlight important interact-able objects (items, weapons etc), was 2008 Bioshock but i am also sure that effect was used in games before that.
Hey Stylized Station Can you do a video on the Borderlands Style? Would love to see an in-depth video on it. Ruined King and Darksiders also have amazing visuals and tho your courses probably go in depth on that stylized graphics. I'd still love a video either way eheh Have a great week
Why is it that this guy can teach me stuff I’m supposed to be learning in Physics 3 with video game footage better than my professor can with a PowerPoint playing?
how do you make fresnel shading work on solid objects to give them the "outline"? since these arent reflective objects, are they? (same with characters)
when it comes to materials in cgi, terms like "reflectivity" are just stand-ins for the intensity of whatever visual effect is tied to the value. it doesn't matter if the real life equivalent of the material is reflective or not; if you want something to have your renderer's reflectivity effect, you can just crank that reflectivity value up and make the _shiniest_ piece of wood or strand of hair or entire chicken or, if you're more concerned about what happens when adding fresnel shaders without replacing a reflectivity effect that your renderer already has ( and one you don't want showing up on things that aren't actually meant to be reflective ), you just ... don't tie the effect to the material's reflectivity. hell, i'm p. sure you won't find all that many implementations that actually link the effect to a material's reflectivity in the first place, because that only makes sense for an engine with shader support too rudimentary to just let you slap a configurable fresnel shader on a material. which would be some p. ancient tech at this point
@@JetFightzer In the real world it controls the ratio of reflected light to refracted light depending on that angle. But you're right that the effect itself need not be so restricted when used in a stylized context. It's a tool that the artist can use however they want.
So this is the fancy name for cell shading? The shading is determined by the ANGLE the light source hits the individual tris? Or is this different in that it’s based on the camera and not the light source?
The terms have been thrown around a bit in the video, so to clarify: The fresnel value/intensity itself is determined by the angle between the view direction and the surface normal, the light has nothing to do with the fresnel intensity itself. Shading that is determined by the angle of the light direction and the surface is... well, just shading, whether realistic or stylized, because it tells you how much something is in shadow. Often, the two are combined, with the stylized examples of outlines on characters being the most noticable. As with many things in shaders, they arent exclusive, they can be combined and used in different ways, depending on the application. Also, Cell shading doesn't necessarily include fresnel effects, as cell shading is just normal shading that is stepped, i.e. no gradient between light and dark, only distinct patches of different shades.
Yeah, you are right. Sometimes I feel like artists never can just learn physics like normal people, they have to overpresume and fuck up everything they see... half of comments here make me die from cringe(I know physics and cg programming)
and valerent uses the standard fliped normals for outlines. In fact frenel looks terrible for most outline applications because it has problems with line thickness.
Why is it called Fresnel effect when it has nothing to do with reflection/refraction in these implementations? The only thing it has in common is its usage of the angle of incidence.
"my favourite gambling game, Genshin Impact" 😂 could've used any number of highly advertised game with tons of lootboxes from the last 5 years but this one really takes the cake doesn't it
Unfortunatly, some devs over use the normal map in the environment wich create a visual hole between the characters and the stage, the textures should be handpainted like Arcsys does.
Hey man, just had a question, there is this anime TV show which is komi can't communicate and it features great visuals. So if anyone wanted to make a game out of it , would it be a time and effort consuming or not
My biggest take away from this video is that Fresnel is pronounced Frehnel and not Freznel. Ive been teaching Photoshop classes and calling it wrong this whole time and no one corrected me. Fml.
@@Sheevlord I'm going off my own experience when I say that. However, there is evidence that sexualization of men and women is prevalent in video games[1], sexualization of women in video games may be harmful to women's self-perception[2], related to online sexual harassment[3], related to real-life sexism[4], related to decreased empathy for female victims of violence[5], and promote hostile sexism against women[6]. You can easily see why some would be weirded out by it. But really, I don't even need to cite sources for this. You know very well that this is the case. [1] _Paul Stermer, S., & Burkley, M. (2012). Xbox or SeXbox? An Examination of Sexualized Content in Video Games. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(7), 525-535. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00442_ [2] _Behm-Morawitz, E., Mastro, D. The Effects of the Sexualization of Female Video Game Characters on Gender Stereotyping and Female Self-Concept. Sex Roles 61, 808-823 (2009). doi:10.1007/s11199-009-9683-8_ [3] _Burnay, J., Bushman, B. J., & Larøi, F. (2019). Effects of sexualized video games on online sexual harassment. Aggressive Behavior. doi:10.1002/ab.21811_ [4] _Gestos, M., Smith-Merry, J., & Campbell, A. (2018). The Representation of Women in Video Games: A Systematic Review of Literature in Consideration of Adult Female Wellbeing. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. doi:10.1089/cyber.2017.0376_ [5] _Gabbiadini A, Riva P, Andrighetto L, Volpato C, Bushman BJ (2016) Acting like a Tough Guy: Violent-Sexist Video Games, Identification with Game Characters, Masculine Beliefs, & Empathy for Female Violence Victims. PLoS ONE 11(4): e0152121. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0152121_ [6] _LaCroix, J. M., Burrows, C. N., & Blanton, H. (2018). Effects of Immersive, Sexually Objectifying, and Violent Video Games on Hostile Sexism in Males. Communication Research Reports, 1-11. doi:10.1080/08824096.2018.1525351_
It's difficult to believe that it took so long for someone to invent the Fresnel lens. If you look at it, it's essentially the exact same thing as a regular lens but the curved profile is segmented and pushed back further to flatten the whole lens, therefore reducing the amount of material light has to travel through and therefore reducing how much "brightness" it loses. If you take the ridges on a Fresnel lens and connect them end to end from top to bottom while extruding them further outwards the closer you are to the centre in order to conserve their angle, you will end up with just a regular lens. Not to take away anything from the man but I feel like people in those times should have reaaaaallly figured that out way sooner lol
Think it was a side-effect of the times. How few people lived an educated life,specialized in his area of science, and had the right amount of factors influencing them to create the conditions to have them try something different. Since the Internet ideas are shared and built into bigger things by a bigger variety of people. In the case of videogames Modding communities are a example of this.
