#rubyrkgk

[rubydeeby]

RAMONA - New Hair Style

I was on the brink of tears in the new show, I've waited decades to see Scott Pilgrim 2...

Background Alts.

Edit: I forgot to do the Soup of the Day

[shoomus]

Fresh Funky drawings I did for my friend @rubyrkgk (pls follow them!!!)

[blazehedgehog]

Would you mind going more into detail on the visual side of Superstars? Some of its shortcomings, inconsistencies, etc. I haven’t had the time to put anything together to discuss it, but had the same feelings about the way it looks that you seem to have, and no one else really seems to see it.

Sure! I actually already broke a lot of this down in my discord for my patreon donors, so I'll just mostly copy and paste what I said out of there. Warning: LOTS of images ahead!

The problem I have with the way the game looks is the lighting. Let's take this screenshot as an example:

I want you to ask yourself: where is the sun positioned in this image?

Let's look at Sonic. On Sonic's body, the sun is above him, to the right, slightly in the background. The top edge of his head has the highlight, which fades in to a shadow closer to the camera.

The shadow on the grass suggests the sun is in the same position, but shining from the foreground. The shadow is being cast going in to the background, away from the camera. This is the opposite of Sonic's body.

This rocky outcropping near the top of the image is receiving very intense edge light from both the left and right sides, but barely from the bottom.

Under the grass at the bottom of the image, we see light shining up from below this rocky arch. You could say that maybe it's light reflecting off the water (caustics), but it lacks the caustic pattern and is pure white light, when the water itself is teal. Caustic reflections also generally don't carry 25+ feet away like this does.

The palm tree fronds are receiving light from the same direction as Sonic is, but the trunk is being lit like the rocks are, which is to say its edges are lit up, even in places that should be in shadow.

This is what's known as "rimlighting." It's an important detail in photography and 3D graphics rendering, because it creates a strong outline for characters and important objects.

The catch being rimlighting is one of those things that works when it makes sense. In photography, getting a good rimlight requires very carefully positioning physical lights in a scene, and that light obeys the properties of reality.

What Sonic Superstars has done is grab a very basic rimlight effect that applies a cheap, colorless halo around objects using a shader. It doesn't obey the properties of real light, it just makes everything look weird and inconsistent, giving it this awkward glowing outline. This type of effect was common in Wii games from the mid-2000's. For example, Super Mario Galaxy uses this type of rimlight quite a lot.

Galaxy gets away with it because it's a game set in space, and these bright glowing rimlights help characters pop out from the dark space backgrounds. And, on brighter levels, the rimlight intensity is reduced considerably:

Sonic Superstars has applied its rimlighting in a very haphazard, cheap, ugly way. Some have called it "Generic Unity Rimlighting" because a lot of low-effort games use it to bad effect. And, as far as we can tell, the game is being made in Unity, because the debug menu uses the default Unity background color.

The whole game's lighting situation just looks muddy and dark and confusing, when I think the ideal should be something like New Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze.

Lighting is a bit flat, but everything is bright, clear, and consistent. Superstars is very messy and dated looking by comparison. And the above two games are like 9 years old!

[rubydeeby]

Kermit

Saw The Muppets Movie (1979) last night and burst into tears at Going to Go Back There Someday. It’s been on my mind all day.

[rubydeeby]

Steven Universe (1998)

[Commission Info] [Other Accounts] [Soup of the Day]

[rubydeeby]

Afterparty - Sex Bob-Omb

My favorite album

Soup of the Day - tiết canh/blood soup

[rubydeeby]

A separate upload of the full page spread from Balance and Barbers, it's my absolute favorite part of the comic, and I want to do more like it

[Commissions] [Carrd] [Soup of the Day]

[rubydeeby]

Day Out With My Favorite Stuff

[Commission Info] [Other Accounts] [Soup of the Day]