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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGU5VlLU6as
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In Actions & Stuff 1.8 we have added support for Minecraft Vibrant Visuals. This means we had to create PBR (Physically Based Rendering) textures for every block, entity & 3D item to make things work with the new lighting system.
PBR consists of 4 values which are important to make things work. Those values are Metalness, Emission, Roughness and Subsurface. We also made use of Normal Maps to add extra detail to our textures.
Metalness and Roughness control the surface look of blocks and entities. These values range from very rough, which result in things looking matte under sunlight, all the way down to no roughness which creates reflections on blocks and makes things shiny. Metalness is usually combined together with low roughness values to create more reflective look and give that sheen on top that metal objects tend to have.
Emission values allow us to make things glow during night or dark lighting conditions. Vibrant Visuals allowed us to add many more emissive effects to blocks which was previously not quite possible in the Fancy Graphics Mode.
Subsurface scattering is a very unique property. It allows light to go through objects and bounce around, then reflect back to the camera. This creates an effect of certain objects being illuminated near the edges, creating much softer and fluffy look to given materials. We used this property on many of the textures in the pack to give them some extra flare.
Normal Maps are used to add details to objects without using additional geometry, but rather create an illusion by making bumps and dents that react to lighting.
Height Maps in Minecraft are very high resolution normal maps which are locked to the pixel grid. By varying the strength of the normal map it creates an illusion of stronger or weaker embossed effect. This makes the pixels stick out, or pull in.
We can (for the most part), only use one of these two rendering options, and we chose to go with Normal Maps, we found that our texturing style being more simplistic than vanilla Minecraft made some really harsh transitions and effects on the textures with height map applied. Height maps are ideal for more noisy texture styles where those harsh transitions aren’t as noticeable. If we are able to support both settings in the future, we will do so!
If you take a closer look at the top of the furnace and bricks you will notice how some of the shapes on the texture have the subtle orange light hitting them and creating blue shadows on the opposite side.
Every biome has been carefully fine-tuned to have its own mood. The colour of the skybox, sunlight, fog and colour grading have all been tweaked.
Custom biome atmposherics and skyboxes are available on the Full Experience (64x) only. The other two subpack options will use the vanilla vibrant visuals biome atmospherics and skyboxes.
Water with Vibrant Visuals now looks more fresh then ever. We added custom wave effects to make it feel more dynamic as opposed to stationary water in fancy graphics. Vibrant visuals also allows us to customize water caustics so we made a custom animation for that to match Actions and Stuff style.
Custom stylised water is available on the Full Experience (64x) only. The other two subpack options will use the vanilla vibrant visuals water.
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