DOA5LR Lighting

[Holden - DOAHDM]

I was hoping that someone out there with some knowledge of cheat engine or just programming in general could consider tackling a script to change lighting parameters in DOA5LR, IE adjust light direction, ambient light/direct light intensity, light color and such.

 

Lighting, to me, is one of the most important aspects that can make or break a good scene. It seems as though at least with the movies, the lighting can range from really very nice to unbelievably awful. While a great deal has been done to expand DOA5 modding since it came out, I feel that this is one seemingly simple thing that would go a long way towards framing better images and videos.

 

Here's an example of a bad shot. The ambient lighting is almost non existent, so while Ayane's front is well lit, her back is almost pitch black. 

 

 

 

 

There's a number of reasons this harsh lighting is bad. One is that it simply doesn't match the environment. If you take some time to look around at the scene you'll notice that the actual environmental lighting does not change at all. It just looks strange when you compare them. 

 

The second reason is that the game engine just doesn't seem to handle harsh high contrast lighting very well. Here's an image that should illustrate that. 

 

 

The models, like basically any character model, have UV seams. That's just how modeling is. Unfortunately even if you smooth the normal map texture, the vertex normals, the diffuse texture and basically everything under the sun you can do with the actual assets (the image depicts a completely vanilla model), you will still see the UV seams under harsh lighting. Obviously this is a pretty big issue, and this image is definitely not the worst example of it.

 

When you look at images of DOAX3, there is at least one identified change to the lighting engine, but at least from my observations it really is not much different, although you might be fooled into thinking so because of how much nicer the scenes are framed. If you glance through their gallery you won't see any of the harsh lighting you see in DOA5LR:

http://www.gamecity.ne.jp/doax3/gallery.html

 

Even in scenes like this they seem to be avoiding it.

 

 

DOAX3 is a little better equipped to handle those kinds of scenes though. The one lighting change that's different in DOAX3 is "subsurface scattering", which does a better job of making flesh look less like plastic in those harsh lighting situations, but I imagine they're probably still avoiding those scenes because they might not have fixed the issue with UV seams being so obvious in those conditions. Here's an example of subsurface scattering. This is actually kind of a bad image but hopefully you should notice what it at least tries to do, focus on the comparison on the right.

 

 

 

 

Under the right lighting conditions I believe DOA5LR can look just is good, if not better than a lot of the DOAX3 promotional images, at least in stills, but those lighting circumstances are few and far in between, and I really wish that could be remedied but I don't have the code junky expertise to see it through. Here's what I believe to be a comparison in ideal circumstances. The rim lighting is more subdued on the left but you get the idea.

 

 

 

 

I should note that I am using some post processing from gedosato, but it's nothing advanced.