Screenshot of the month August 2015 [Winner Announced!]

[Vectrotek]

So I get the champagne out, call all my buddies, light the fire, prepare for the big celebration and ... .. .

[CuteAlien]

Tss, those mods must be sleeping ;-)

[Vectrotek]

Pop! Pshhhhhh! Yipeee! My neighbours won't be!
Irrlicht rules! O.K.

[chronologicaldot]

Allow me to be the first to congratulate you, Vectrotek! d-(^_^)-b

[Vectrotek]

Thanks chronologicaldot! And thanks to the people that voted!

[thanhle]

Nice soft shadow.
Great stuff, congratulation mate.

Cheers

[mongoose7]

I can't see any shadows?? Maybe ambient occlusion?

[Vectrotek]

Thanks guys!
The Ambient Occlusion was an interesting problem.
It was "Baked" in Blender. The problem with baking things like Shadows, Light Maps and AO is that
if your model has UV Coords that are "Shared" by different vertices (saving UV space hence tangents), then
baking becomes complicated.
Pixels that were written for a given polygon would then be rewritten on the same place for
another polygon with different surface lighting.
The resulting bake looks like a mess for these "shared" UV Coords.
The solution for this is to somehow remap all your UV Coords in such a way that each vertex in the model has
it own unique place on the UV Map. This then also creates the possibility that your "UV Islands" could end up "turned".
Turned UV islands result in the normal map RGB i.e. XYZ pixels no longer being meaningful.
So when you "re-organize" your Islands you must make sure that they do not "turn" during the remapping process.
This way the Normal map referred to by the polygon would still have its XYZ facing in the right direction.
One program that does this quite well is "3D Coat" which has a "don't turn islands" option in "rearrange islands".

As you probably know, it is possible to have Two sets of UV Coords for a model.
One set would have shared UV Positions to save space and rendered with the help of Tangents and Binormals.
The other set would be unique UV positions allowing for uniquely baked surface lighting.
The model in the screen grab does not have two sets, thus not using UV Space very economically!

I'm working on a procedure in my Irrlicht apps that would allow you to "load" the second set of UV Coords for
a given model with the UV Coords of an exact copy of that model, but with unique "lightmapable" UVs.
Irrlicht makes provision for two sets of UVs, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Another problem was that the model had many different sets of maps which I had to "consolidate" into one
image using Blender (particularly Blender 2.49 as this cool plugin didn't survive the Python Implementation Update from 5.0 onwards).

[Vectrotek]

Here is the Diffuse Map..
See how lots of space was wasted because of "Unque UV Coords".
Also see how the "coin" was duplicated. One with AO and one without.
When I get the "Second UV" Loading procedure right I'll post it, probably with this model as an examlpe.
(I've still got a hangover!)