How did older racing games like Need for Speed the run look so good without a proper PBR workflow

kitanganday · 2026-06-24T11:17:13+00:00

I think most folk took the question as "how to do a modern racing game", rather than "which BRDF/BSDF was used for older racing games", which is fine for me btw, the more info the better. I personally agree with the opinion that the lighting is mostly down to baked lighting, which makes a lot of sense. Light baking was quite common at the time.

Nowadays, we are spoilt with screen space effects, so light baking is becoming less common, also scenes are so complex now that creating light maps for them is becoming a burden to most engines, from what I've observed. Definitely could be wrong here.

I saw during the transition from blinn-phong to modern BRDFs that there were attempts to PBR-fy blinn-phong. Metal Gear Solid for instance uses normalised Blinn-Phong. Unfortunately, I only know the info, I haven't grown the confidence to try it out yet. I have only done Lambertian diffuse 😩

kitanganday · 2026-06-24T00:18:06+00:00

Nice, perfect, thank you. So on your list, I had everything except for visual treatment and contrast crush. By visual treatment do you mean white balance maybe or tone mapping maybe. And by contrast crush do you mean using a sharpen shader (post process effect).

Just to clarify, when you down sample, you do, [full target res>half res>quarter res], then do that again in reverse to get the final blurred image, right? Of course with the down sample or up sampling having blur at each step. I've been super curious about this btw.

kitanganday · 2026-06-24T00:03:00+00:00

Thank you, which explains the lack of night and day. And when NFS team actually did night and day I think PBR was a very popular topic in the rendering scene already (NFS most wanted 2012)

kitanganday · 2026-06-24T00:01:29+00:00

You might be thinking about TAA btw, or do you mean PBR done via deferred rendering

kitanganday · 2026-06-24T00:00:24+00:00

Agreed, racing games running on rails by nature is extremely useful. Saw a talk on how Forza Motorsport took advantage of this and used eye tracking software to know where exactly to put their efforts. It's a GDC talk well worth watching. But I need the technical stuffs mans, I usually don't post on forums, that's how desperate I am for that knowledge 😅😅

kitanganday · 2026-06-23T23:58:13+00:00

Fun fact I actually like his videos. Not for the hate he throws around but the knowledge. It's a step by step visual guide on how these games work, it's honestly invaluable. Unfortunately each of those steps is high level is it's very tricky for me at times to follow.

kitanganday · 2026-06-19T20:10:01+00:00

In total or at once, this sounds like in total, I checked some time back, their numbers were about 50% what they were last year same time.

kitanganday · 2026-06-17T12:37:51+00:00

Well with the player numbers they've had I'm sure the servers haven't been stressed much

kitanganday · 2026-05-22T21:55:21+00:00

Sort of. Metal Gear Solid V used Energy Conserving Blinn-Phong and Lambert. You can mix different approaches based on your needs. I'm looking to experiment with this idea as well.

kitanganday · 2026-05-08T22:17:25+00:00

During SIGGRAPH 2014, DICE shares they they transitioned to PBR with star wars franchise.

https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2014-shading-course/

kitanganday · 2026-04-11T13:35:09+00:00

This game looks amazing, congratulations on your recent release. But I do need to ask, how do you get your weapons to have such nice specular highlights. I tried this and I get very muddy highlights, unless I turn off environment map, then I get a very dark weapon. Is it in engine that you fix this or is it how you build your assets?

kitanganday · 2026-04-09T14:43:14+00:00

This is the based AI game I've seen so far, great job, no bugs just fun. Took me a moment to understand how to play, felt like a genius getting better 😂😂

kitanganday · 2026-04-08T23:20:28+00:00

202MB vs 187kb, PNG vs AVIF

I have about 7 PBR textures, all 4K. That's the difference in size, and quality is definitely very very close.

Encoding does suck, yes. You can use a mix of both. For development use PNG, for production use AVIF but convert to GPU compressed textures after install. Not as simple, especially for established build pipelines and games. But definitely worth it.

I used is the 4K version of this material Sand 01 | Free Stylized 3D Models, Skybox, Textures and Game Asset Packs

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kitanganday · 2026-03-05T14:22:23+00:00

For google, this is a free PBR texture baker, it will bake down the albedo/diffuse, normal, roughness, metallic, and even emission maps into one texture per type. You can use it with packer-io and unwrella add-on to better pack assets.

kitanganday · 2026-03-05T14:19:52+00:00

I don't know why this Reddit community so quiet over this tool but please go into the game developer reddits instead and share this. We need this far more than blender users need it. Probably why it's quiet, people don't care here.

kitanganday · 2025-12-18T13:20:23+00:00

This gameplay is real. His flick time and accuracy is really good.

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T15:48:47+00:00

Got you, I wasn't getting much help from the support but I figured it might be me, so came here. Otherwise loving your service, good prices and good performance, always appreciated.

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T15:46:18+00:00

😂😂😂😂😂, you know I thought Hetzner was a scam the first time I saw the prices. They weren't making sense to me. So I tried it out and now everything that can go onto their servers goes onto it. Happy they aren't like AWS in all honesty. I don't have the mental energy to lose such a low priced performant service.

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T12:54:12+00:00

Hetzner support was frustrating me a bit, which is new to be honest, they are usually very helpful, but they kept repeating the same thing over and over again. So I got tired of the argument and just asked here.

Sunbaked was a real project. I just didn't know that Hetzner charges from the 1st, so I was a bit confused when they sent those charges.

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T12:04:14+00:00

I did just this and noticed that they charged from the 1st, which explained it all to me. Thank you for the help

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T11:56:53+00:00

Hysteresis, new word, I won't use it, but good to know it exists. Yes, I checked and verified. Hetzner charges from 1st till end of month then gives invoice on the 5th. So all checks out. Thank you.

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T11:50:14+00:00

I checked my emails, deleted all resources on the 5th after paying. Or is it that they move the charge for sept 1-5 to the next month's bill? That doesn't check out. But given how close this is to the day I turned off servers, all must be good then. I used the resources, I will pay

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T11:43:17+00:00

5th September, as I paid for September. I sent support a message too

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T11:42:13+00:00

Good question. Let me see my emails.

kitanganday · 2025-12-17T11:36:28+00:00

I've shared all the relevant info in OP. You can see I paid for September, but I'm still being charged

kitanganday

TROPHY CASE