Screenshots

[o'dium]

Looks like "normal" blending on the terrain, or is there anything specific that I don't see 'bout it?

Its Quake 2 chap, give it a break yeah

Anyway, its using denisty masks for both foliage and terrain as well as per surface impacts (With 32 surface impact effects.)

[jal_]

Is that "just" vertex blending? Doesn't look like unless the terrain is modelled. It's hard to say without seeing the tris, but the rock-sand seam doesn't look like being a triangles strip. Too thin.

[o'dium]

Well its vertex blending, with density masks and all manner of stuff. But it is vertex blending at its heart, yeah. Its not going to get much better than this, really, for us at least. It looks good enough, it works nice and clean and it works with the lighting. I don't have a problem with it. Of course I would LOVE some other way, like MegaTexture or even an advanced painting method... But those ways are either too hard to do (MT) or wont work with the lighting model (TS).

[jal_]

Well its vertex blending, with density masks and all manner of stuff.

In the mapper end this means you can't have more than 2 textures per triangle, but you can select per-density-mask pixel (bigger than a texture pixel) which of the two textures to show. Am I guessing it right?

[o'dium]

Well the way it works is kinda like Doom 3, only expanded. In doom 3, you can only use 2 textures per "surface", or triangle if you want to go that small. We offer that process, which means you must cut your mesh up into seperate surfaces.

However we also offer a new solution that allows you to use a single surface, but have as many textures on it as you want. Using an RGB lookup table and a blend texture with seperate colours on it, we can blend the terrain as much as we want, however we want, where we want.

Its really the best we can do in this kind of engine, and to be fair, it can still produce some really awesome looking terrain results.

[obsidian]

Texture work in progress. Still need to add mechanical overlays and hubs, then individualize the gears.

As I posted in the past, I've been experimenting with vector based graphics. The shapes (gears, bolts, embossed metal bits) were all created in Adobe Illustrator so that they can be freely rotated and scaled without loss of detail or edge definition that bitmap based graphics are prone to do.

Eventually, this texture will be layered onto separate texture sheets and modified to accompany a model I'm working on in 3ds Max.

[Plan B]

Very nice, obs. I really dig the steampunky feel.

One think I don't really understand, though:
For such a mechanism to work shouldn't the gears be interconnecting?
But you say you're still going to add mechanical overlays and hubs, so maybe they'll connect the gears.

[phantazm11]

That is very cool there, obsidian. Can't wait to see the final product.

[o'dium]

Yeah, it really looks odd with nothing joining...?

[fKd]

i agree with what o'dium said. but still very cool

[wattro]

i think its just a texture... the model is elsewhere (in hiding!).

i don't know how it will look when its wrapped around the model, but right now they look like very thin cogs

[Castle]

was about to say..
A picture of quake 2 that looks like doom 3?

Whats going on here guys? This is wrong. It wasn't supposed to happen this way.

[Fjoggs]

Almost finished.

[urgrund777]

C) Sprites are not exactly possible here While I could use them, you have to remember the lighting engine we use, i.e. you cant have a lit sprite. It would be fullbright. So while its possible to use them, they would probably end up looking worse

You could run a per-instance ambient term over them, make them 'work' with the surface a bit better... I wrote an ambient occlusion tool to run over instances, even with 5000+ instance models it's pretty fast because you're only calculating an instances world pos ambient term, not it's local ambient term. This helped instances fit much better into the scene, as seen in these "Before & After" shots:









For grass, sprites would be a good option to explore - you can jam pack a scene with them, they have constant 'volume' by virtue of being camera facing sprites... and again, although they are run in a full-bright pass, each point representing a grass-sprite location can have an ambient term and a fixed lighting vector (perhaps from the sun) to feed in as a constant to the fullbright shader without breaking the batching.


...other stuff: wrote a water shader for a demo I'm doing.
Has a caustics texture that is extruded along the light tangent vector to emulate real depth and 'godrays' in foggy water, looks impressive in motion, they are subtle in a screenshot (visible bottom right)... it's a surface only effect, so you can't go underneath it.

[o'dium]

We already do an ambient pass using the average pixel desnsity colour under the instance. But that doesn't mean that grass will look ok. We have far more to worry about than a lightmap lit game and we have thousands upon ahousands of instances to render too. All of which need to be dynamic in animation (Wind deform etc) and have the correct lighting info/normals and spec stored on them. So its not quite as easy as that. Itsn ot worth it alone simply for the fullbright issue... what about night maps, where there are lights on the map lighting up the ground? Fine if you hack it, but then, what about gunfire and dlights, which WILL happen and be seen a lot? What then? They just wont work.

As for water, we have all of the above and godrays are planned, however we are doing real time god rays for the entire world from every light source, not just water. So I know how good they are

[NBLM2]

@Fjoggs
wow

wip:

[rgoer]

fjoggs that looks rad

only comment would be that in the open atrium area, all the roofline detail sits at exactly the same elevation across the entire scene

lookin real good though, nice

[Hipshot]

That water looks really cool, would it be possible to see it in motion, some dev-vid perhaps?

What I don't really understand is, the before shot looks better, the vgt has shadows on them, the after shot does not? Or did I mix them up now? =)

[Hipshot]

Fjoggs, have you been using detail textures here? or is it just a grain in the base diffuse on most textures?

[a13n]

Fjoggs, have you been using detail textures here? or is it just a grain in the base diffuse on most textures?

I'm sensing these are not detail judging from the distance.

[^misantropia^]

@NBLM2: digging the grimy industrial look, really nice.

[Hipshot]

@ NBLM2, that trim texture you use, it has a white line on it, I take it's not supposed to be there? Makes the texture to not look seamless...

Fjoggs, have you been using detail textures here? or is it just a grain in the base diffuse on most textures?

I'm sensing these are not detail judging from the distance.

You're probably right.

[Fjoggs]

rgoer: I tried popping a skyportal in there, but I couldn't get it to work.
Gonna add a normal skyline instead.

Hipshot: What's detail textures? :X

[Hipshot]

Sometimes when my portal sky doesn't work, I just remove the _skybox ent and creates a new one... don't know why, but it seems to "break" at rare occasions.

Btw: http://pumpkin.game-server.cc/q3map2/sh ... tml#detail I myself can't find good usage for it, maybe you can...

[obsidian]

Hipshot: What's detail textures? :X

http://www.robotrenegade.com/q3map2/doc ... tml#detail

It was used significantly in American McGee's Alice and a few other games. I don't think any of the stock Quake 3 shaders used them.