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Render Settings

SMG edited this page Mar 5, 2023 · 14 revisions

The Render Settings menu controls various aspects of the application's viewport rendering.

Debug Shading

The debug shading section controls what textures or attributes are displayed in the viewport. The Debug Modes are split into multiple sections. Modes in the shading section are calculated during rendering like albedo color or bitangents. The other sections render values from textures or vertex attributes without any modifications. Note that missing textures default to white, and missing vertex attributes default to black in the viewport. Some debug modes have additional settings such as isolating a specific set of color channels.

Checking "Wireframe" will draw a white outline for the model's edges in supported shading modes. Checking "Floor Grid" will draw an infinite grid on the XZ-plane with grid lines every 10 scene units.

Shading Modes

SSBH Editor has a number of debug shading modes to better understand how the different inputs like material parameters and textures affect the final rendered image. Some of the debug modes listed below link to corresponding pages on the Smash Ultimate Material Research website with more information.

Shading

Shaded - The main shading mode with all effects applied like lighting, shadows, and post processing.
Basic - Similar to the Normals debug mode but with very basic lambertion diffuse lighting applied.
Normals - The normals after applying the normal maps. The calculated normals depend on the tangents, bitangents, and normal maps. Disable the nor map channels to see if issues with the normals are caused by one of these inputs.
Bitangents - The calculated bitangent vectors used for anisotropic highlights and normal map rendering. Bitangents point in the direction of the V coordinate of the model's UVs or texture coordinates.
Unlit - The color after applying textures and materials. This includes col maps, diffuse maps, emi maps, and material parameters like CustomVector11. This does not include any lighting or vertex color.
ShaderComplexity - An estimate of the rendering cost of a material using a heatmap with warmer colors being more expensive to render than cooler coolers. This uses a simple heuristic, so the relative difference in cost between two materials may not be accurate. Complex materials with PRM maps will typically be orange. The intent of this debug mode is to identify potentially resource intensive areas. Avoid covering larger portions of the screen with high-cost materials that render as orange or yellow on the heatmap for the best performance in game.

Vertex Attributes

Position0
Normal0
Tangent0
Map1
Bake1
UvSet
UvSet1
UvSet2

Vertex Color

ColorSet1
ColorSet2
ColorSet3
ColorSet4
ColorSet5
ColorSet6
ColorSet7

Textures

Texture0 - Col Map (Layer 1)
Texture1 - Col Map (Layer 2)
Texture2 - Irradiance Cube Map
Texture3 - Ambient Occlusion Map
Texture4 - Nor Map
Texture5 - Emissive Map (Layer 1)
Texture6 - Prm Map
Texture7 - Specular Cube Map
Texture8 - Diffuse Cube Map
Texture9 - Diffuse Cube Map
Texture10 - Baked Lighting Map
Texture11 - Diffuse Map (layer 1)
Texture12 - Diffuse Map (layer 2)
Texture13 - Diffuse Map (layer 3)
Texture14 - Emissive Map (layer 2)
Texture16 - Ink Normal Map

Render Passes

The render passes section controls which contributions are rendered such as diffuse or specular. This is helpful for figuring out what gives a model its color. If a model has excessive bloom, uncheck "Enable Bloom" to verify that bloom is actually contributing to the brightness. With "Enable Bloom" checked, uncheck one render pass at a time until the bloom reduces to an acceptable level. This is usually caused by the diffuse or specular passes.

This section gives a non-exhaustive list of what textures and parameters contribute to each render pass.

  • Enable Diffuse - stage lighting and textures like Texture0 (Col) or Texture10 (Diffuse)
  • Enable Specular - specular highlights, stage cube map and textures like the Prm alpha and Nor alpha
  • Enable Emission - emission textures and associated material parameters
  • Enable Rim Lighting
  • Enable Bloom

Lighting

Uncheck "Enable Shadows" to see a more uniform view of the model's brightness and improve viewport performance on weaker GPU hardware.

Materials

The "Enable Vertex Color" option controls whether color set attributes are applied like colorSet1 or colorSet5. The "Scale Vertex Color" option controls whether the color set scaling is applied like 2.0 for colorSet1. Unchecking color channels for the Nor and Prm maps will replace the texture color channels with a default value. This essentially disables that channel and can be helpful for figuring out which textures are causing unwanted shading artifacts.

Skeleton

Checking "Draw Bones" will show the bones and joints for each of the nusktb files in the viewport. Bones will move based on animations currently playing. Most bones will render in a gray color. Purple bones are bones that have helper bone constraints applied from the model.nuhlpb file. A joint is drawn from each parent bone pointing to its child. Note that joints are drawn based purely on the bone's animated position. For seeing a bone's orientation, also enable "Draw Bone Axes".

Checking "Draw Bone Names" will render the name next to each bone. This can have a noticeable performance impact, so only enable this option when needed.

The "Draw Bone Axes" option displays the accumulated world orientation of each bone. This is the final rotation of each bone after inheriting all the rotation of its parents along the bone chain. The red, green, and blue lines represent the transformed XYZ axes. This can aid in debugging bone orientation issues from incorrectly configured animations or helper bones.

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