Throwing Some Shaders

My plans to work on sandbox mode got thwarted the last two days as I started dabbling with a new shader and got lost in the work. The current shader has a handful of issues that aren't really noticeable in the screenshots but a few are present in the current version of the dressing room. First, the shadows never really render sharply and there always seems to be some flickering that occurs on the skin as the character animates or moves through the scene. On top of that, there is no support for point lights or spot lights; the lights used in the video featuring the dancing waifus are actually hacked together to give the impression of spot lights even though the light hitting the waifu actually originates from directional lights.

I started out yesterday by getting the basic settings in place for the new shader and then posted a comparison video to Reddit in the hopes of getting some feedback. Most of the comments ran directly in-line with my own assessment; the original shader was better but it clearly wasn't the best option. The best option was going to be a combination of the two, and you can see the original comparison in the following video.

I woke up today and immediately began going through the feedback I'd received and then went to task. After another full day of shader work, texture painting, and numerous other adjustments, I have a version of the new shader that I am pretty happy with. There's definitely room for improvement in the future, but I am (almost) confident that I'll be implementing this new shader into the game itself very soon (this work was done in a prototype project outside of the game's project). Below are four skin tones using the new shader, and although there is a bit of color loss from the upload to RedGifs, what you see below is fairly close to the actual results, with just a bit of saturation lost.

As always, I'm open to feedback and critiques from anyone willing to take the time to offer them. I am not sure when I'll be changing the game over to use the new shader, but my freelance schedule is pretty open this week so I may just take the majority of the week off to get this in place and see how it all ties together with the current gameplay. I'll be spending the rest of my night working on sandbox mode, and plans to share gameplay video of those updates has been postponed until next weekend.