Printable Version of Topic

Posted by: joshpurple May 4 2007, 12:02 AM

This is compressed (HyperCam screen capture to gif), but I was happy to see the results of what a default Max 'dirt' texture looked like in DWARF;


(I put the dirt terrain mesh above the ground)

I was not able to get shadows to show-up. I tried F7, and I reduced the number of lights in the DWARF scene to one spot. I did have the cast shadows selected. And I reduced the scene's ambient light to 0. It looks like the objects scale affects the objects brightness in DWARF? When I added the dirt mesh at a Scale value of 1, it looked like it had a very bright ambient light to it. When I scaled it up to 4 or 5, it lost it's very bright ambient light (looking like the example above).

Great to mess with, I look forward to doing more with DWARF .

Posted by: Cobra May 4 2007, 02:52 AM

Yes, the light normals change when you scale the object. It's an option we are going to probably have as selectable in the newer versions, rather than mandatory.

Posted by: Cobra May 4 2007, 08:42 AM

Btw-- nice to see you are still experimenting with DWARF! So Am I actually, -snip- forgot this was public >.<

Posted by: echorev May 4 2007, 09:03 AM

cobra is that an actual shot from DWARF ?

Posted by: joshpurple May 4 2007, 09:07 AM

Outstanding! And Thank You Cobra . That looks GREAT!

(And I think that's the same program I have, Yay! )

Posted by: Cobra May 4 2007, 10:16 AM

Yes it is echo, and thanks JP

Even with our still simple tool we can create beutiful scenes.

Keep up the good work Josh

Posted by: John May 4 2007, 10:17 AM

Just a curiosity, what sort of texture resolution are we looking at in these two images? Like the tree, and the dirt ground (how many repetions if any)?

Posted by: Cobra May 4 2007, 10:27 AM

The tree is textured using 2 texture files. One for the leaves and one for the trunk. Both are 256x256 PNGs.

here's another I did some time ago;

Posted by: joshpurple May 4 2007, 10:30 AM

Ah, good question John, and I should have posted that . The dirt is 512 x 512, jpg (but you are looking at the gif compression). Here's the dirt texture:



This looks a little stretched, but that is from my relaxing of the UV's (so the texture would 'fit' the ground mesh better).

----------------

Edit: Another nice shot Cobra!

Posted by: John May 4 2007, 10:43 AM

Okay, the ground texture still looks pretty good, even through the compression, but the tree texture up that close looks a little hazed. Is that just stretching/warping, or are we looking at using 512x512 textures for most surfaces of that size?

Posted by: Cobra May 4 2007, 11:03 AM

We will most likely use 512x512 textures for the trees. The default materials included with the tool I used were not satisfactory.

With parallax mapping and specular maps it should look excellent. Besides that self-shadowing is a big plus when it comes to trees.

Posted by: RicoSuave May 4 2007, 01:05 PM

I don't know a fraction of what you guys do with art and visual design, so I'm a little sheepish in asking this. How many light sources are there in your two jpgs Cobra? It looks like all light is ambient only.

If I understand correctly, there can be dozens of unique types of light sources, for example, the single bright spot (Sun), the reflective light off shiny objects, the reflective light off dull yet bright objects, ambient light, atmospheric light (filtering), and on & on. I know the shots you posted are only drafts/experiments, and that I wouldn't even qualify myself as a novice, however, it seems like the blades of grass and the leaves on the trees need a strong shadow on one side of them. From what I've learned, there would probably be some type of very very light green filter down near the base of the tree trunk. Does DWARF allow for many different light types (not just single sources)? How about scattered light through a dusty environment? Is there a way to change the reflective property of a tile in different areas of it (i.e. have a sappy area on a tree trunk that still looks like the texture or perhaps even having it look like it just rained over the whole tree)? Is adding shadow the last step in the process?

(I wish I knew more about this topic)

Posted by: joshpurple May 4 2007, 01:52 PM

You're awesome Rico, and no worries at all about your background . I think you've asked a ton of outstanding questions, -bully for you!

I don't know all the answers, but I always recommend playing with DWARF to see the fun, woo! woo!

One aspect to DWARF is, it's the World Editor, but not the Game Engine itself. A lot of of the questions you have asked ( I think ) will be more directly involved in the Game Engine. The World Editor is for creating the levels that will then be used in-game. So a number of items may not need to be supported in DWARF, but will be supported in-game. And, that's just my guess, Cobra and others know a lot more than I do

Posted by: njpaul May 4 2007, 02:12 PM

Just a note about why scaling affects lighting. When an object gets scaled, so do the normals. By default Ogre will not renormalize the normals so lighting works correct. They opted by default for speed instead of style. The SVN version of Dwarf has the change made so normals are renormalized. However, when textures are put on the object through shaders, this problem does not exist because the shader has to normalize normals anyways (well, it doesn't have to I suppose, but not normalizing a speed optimization you can perform to make the trade off between speed and quality; it also reduces the instruction count if you are hitting those constraints in the shader).

Also, I'm not too sure we are going to want to parallax map things like trees. It's rather expensive and there are a lot of them. It'd be fine to have a render quality option for such things though.

On a side note, I'm not even a huge fan of parallax mapping. I like what it can produce, but after seeing parallax occlusion mapping nothing really compares. I can't wait to see what kind of things are possible with geometry shaders too. I imagine our art will start off with techniques common today, but over time we'll add patches to the game to increase the rendering quality using newer techniques as they come along.

Posted by: Jerky May 4 2007, 02:28 PM

Exactly what I would have said. You know more than you think .

Another note is, we are redoing DWARF, pretty much from the ground up again. This version was to show we could do something. The next will be much better.

Posted by: joshpurple May 4 2007, 02:58 PM

Thanks Jerky!

Njpaul, Brilliant as always!

Parallax occlusion is great stuff. If anyone has a particular shader, or method, etc. they would like to see used, please feel free to mention it, & I'll be glad to work on it with the 3D stuff .

I'll see what I can learn on Parallax occlusion, oFusion, and Max.

Posted by: Cobra May 4 2007, 03:08 PM

The strong shadows on the blades of grass and the leaves and so forth is a bug we weren't able to crush before we released DWARF, and still haven't since we are rebuilding it from the ground up anyways.

Here are a pair of screenshots i submitted when submitted the bugreport. Shows the problem quite well




Btw; remember that these screenshots are very early drafts of alot of work. As long as I breathe, it will look 100x better.

Posted by: Maxwell May 4 2007, 09:35 PM

Wow this is very neat thread, I have no clue what any of this is. Just to throw an Idea out there, maybe someone could write an article on it.

Posted by: joshpurple May 4 2007, 09:39 PM

Thank You Maxwell!

Posted by: njpaul May 4 2007, 10:01 PM

I may take you up (and any other one of our artists) on that offer. I want to make a simple scene in Ogre to play with shaders. I just haven't had time to do this, but I should have more time next week, since I'm graduating tomorrow. Basically I want to design a scene that uses, or has the potential to use, a variety of shader effects. I'd need someone to do the modeling and texturing though. I could make the final results into a tech demo for us too if we wanted.

Posted by: joshpurple May 4 2007, 10:12 PM

CONGRATULATIONS!! Outstanding! Like I said, Brilliant! *highfive*




You got it! Very cool, I can get you models no problem, and the oFusion materials and textures allow me to apply shaders (I've already learned a couple of the shaders, and -very cool- it looks like oFusion will support the new Max 9 Mental Ray Arch. Materials. I'll be sure to post examples )

Thanks! And Congrats again!

Posted by: RicoSuave May 6 2007, 09:01 AM

Graduating on Cinco de Mayo. Celebrating a victory with another victory... BRILLIANT!


NJPaul = teh win!!11ONE


Congratulations!
(now let's see some of that schooling in action)