Please implement an avatar brightness slider for each player to fix shader/lighting issues.
Aemeth
There's a problem with avatars that are either very pale or have a deep tone that visit various maps: the lighting on most of these places make these avatars either look blown out, or not visible at all. It forces players to choose avatars of medium skin tone to fix the problem, but that makes them unable to pick what they really want to be.
I think this is more than just the fault of an individual map's lighting issue. This can range from everything from an individual's headset brightness settings, to the map's lighting, to what post processing is uses.. there are a lot of variables that play into this. But the short of it is, there's an issue with seeing some avatars in this game when you should be able to see them under reasonable circumstances. You can see a pale person and a dark-toned person in real life. So why can't we view them that well in this game?
My solution is, let's have a brightness setting for players to fix this. When you select avatars on the menu, you can adjust the brightness slider to bring up that individual's lighting, or tone it down. On a map where you're unable to disable bloom or post-processing, this would be a godsend.
This would also help with people who are purposefully using a whitelisted shader that's causing an eyesore on a map with how bright they appear. Turn their brightness down without disabling it, and now you can talk to them and enjoy how their avatar is supposed to look.
Thank you for taking a look and considering this issue. I hope you'll agree with my suggestion, it could help a lot of avatars!
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Silent
This isn't really a solvable problem, but let me go over it from a few sides.
a) When avatars are too bright
...this is an issue with the world's lighting. The model of headset being used doesn't really come into it. Like, if your TV is too bright, you're not going to see individual things at different brightness. It'll affect the whole screen.
There's lots of resources on there on how to get your lighting right, and I've written a bunch of them, but there's always going to be more new people doing stuff without knowing, and there's also always going to be language barriers and understanding barriers that prevent people from interpreting the guides fully.
Ultimately, VRC is a social game, so if someone's world is broken, you should take the initiative and tell them about it.
You can even get an avatar made for world debugging from my LightBox and Avatar Testing that will tell you how bright the lights in a map are.
b) When avatars are too dark
...that's more on the side of the shader the person is using. Several popular shaders clamp the incoming lighting, which is totally wrong IMO... But, hey, that's why my shader exists.
c) Can VRC work around it?
Not really. To adjust the brightness of avatars, they'd need to have some way to adjusting the way the avatars render. Now, they
could
adjust the lighting data sent to each avatar, but that would need the avatar shader to respect the lighting data in the first place. As it turns out there aren't really any other ways they could do this that aren't slow and horrible and broken, so this is effectively impossible.Additional sidenotes:
With Avatar 3.0, people can give themselves lighting sliders that animate shader parameters for everyone. Then they can be responsible for their own lighting. So that's part of your problem solved. The reality is that problems with world lighting won't be solved without people learning about how to set their lighting and postprocessing properly.
kawashirov
In most cases there is a two main reasons why this happens:
- World creators didnt set up lighting properly. (No or bad light/reflection probes, rt lighting w/o rt shadows, too many rt lights over limit, ...)
- Players using avatars with shaders that ignores Unity's lighting standarts. That is especially with toon shaders. Most of it not universsal and disigned to work well only on specific cases and do not support all lighting features. Some (like Unlits) completly ignores lighting environment of scene.
You can see it by yourself if you turn off shaders in well-designed world. Almost all players looks with same brightnes, just some of them becoming unlit due to not perfect shader replacement (I suggest to not use Unlits in replacements at all).
And changing brightness is not a simple thing. Shaders and Unity rendering pipeline pretty solid and can not be altered very much at runtime. You just can not tell to pre-compiled shaders that some individual brightness property exists.
kawashirov
Lighting is more about how engine works and how assets designed, not about VRC code.
Assets can not be affected very much at runtime in general. So it's not VRC issue.
ivankazuya
It might also be a good idea for world developers who encounter bloom, emmisive and tone issues on avatars to incorporate a feature to adjust these parameters within their world.