Ambient Occlusion Demo

[Mel]

Then i suggest you to take a peek to Unreal Engine III editor. UEngine III uses a complex material system which allows a lot of pretty nice effects, while all of them are in one basic shader, essentially, you add effects, operations, and combine them as if you were writting a shader. I took a small idea from that, and so, i did a "detail bump" shader, among others.

The truth is that most of the times, they're basic textures, but combined in such way that it almost never looks the same. None the less, that is a great tutorial too!

[dlangdev]

Here is a scene with only one texture. (color+AO + shadow). Notice to try to get the nice, prerendered lighting and shadows to match the fast ugly realtime lighting and shadows of the ball.

I've been thinking about that lighting is more than simply calculating the specular value and simply adding it to gl_Fragcolor. The results come out a bit too simple. I would like to spend more time dealing with it and find out how to improve it. We'll see how that goes when I get the specular texture going, I have a guess how to use the specular maps just for that.

[dlangdev]

The truth is that most of the times, they're basic textures, but combined in such way that it almost never looks the same.

That is starting to sink-in to me as I'm going which is not pretty easy. I'm not really a texture artist by any chance, so I'm actually stretcing it a little bit too far. The scene I made is very small, that should save me a lot of hours from creating textures.

[dlangdev]

Dang. I messed-up. I need to re-model the whole scene, texture measurements are way off.

OldSkool: Are you using any architectural measurements when you model in Blender? I need to know how to correctly measure a dimension so they all line-up properly.

How do I setup a cube that is 256x256x256 units? Thanks.

[dlangdev]

I found a good article here...awesome tutorial, btw.

Hard Surface Texture Painting:
http://www.game-artist.net/forums/vbart ... ticleid=22

Ref:
http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photosh ... -textures/

I'll test the scene using Irrlicht first and Humus3D later, though.

[oldskoolPunk]

I've been thinking about that lighting is more than simply calculating the specular value and simply adding it to gl_Fragcolor. The results come out a bit too simple.

True. Thats where your spec map comes in. But you have to remember, its all about speed. Colormap + lightmap + specmap + depthmap + normalmap + alphamap + illumination map = Woah! I need a new computer! This will become more evident once you start working with larger maps with characters.

Dang. I messed-up. I need to re-model the whole scene, texture measurements are way off.

OldSkool: Are you using any architectural measurements when you model in Blender? I need to know how to correctly measure a dimension so they all line-up properly.

How do I setup a cube that is 256x256x256 units? Thanks.

Slow down! Thats a really nice room you have there. While everything can share the same lightmapping UV coords, each different part (like walls, floors, ect) will have to have thier own detailMap UV coords. Just create a new set of UV's in Blender, select all the wall polies, and unwrap them, assign a texture, and line it up in the uv window. If you are using the b3d exporter it will all import into Irrlicht and blend both textures automatically!

I really dont like to do this but I have to recommend this book I recently got on this subject. Its called "3D Game Environments" by Luke Ahearn. Its a little expensive, but wow. It starts out getting you acquainted with all the terminology and workflows (pretty basic for us), but then walks you through the creation of about 4 or 5 different game worlds, covering modeling, uv mapping, and texture creation (from scratch). And comes with a DVD containing ALL the assets used AND several peices of very nice software (including L3DT, SpeedTree, and others). It is very generic, and the only references to actual tools to use are included

[dlangdev]

Thanks for the comment, I'll use the current dimension and see where it will go.

I saw the book written by Ahearn, months ago. In fact, I spent about one hour browsing that book while sipping a cup of coffee at a local Barnes and Nobles bookshop.

I'm currently figuring how to make textures, though. I found another interesting page here...

http://www.game-artist.net/forums/speed ... e-now.html

... checking out the work done by Midgar, that's the one I'll be implementing.

[dlangdev]

And here's my first attempt at grunge texturing...

[xray]

Your AO scene is very nice I would keep it up.

One thing you said and I dont understand was "Dang. I messed-up. I need to re-model the whole scene, texture measurements are way off." ! I dont know what it has to do with your model size. I mean every models size appear to be relative when you create something in any 3d app. So no matter how big it is at the moment. Also the textures could be sized as well...

And here's my first attempt at grunge texturing...

When you start texturing you should first select and create the color texture, so which material it excists in real. So your pillars could be concrete, so I would start creating a concrete texture, and as second the dirt maps.

[Mel]

looks good! try to scale the UV Maps in the middle of the column model, so, the texture is repeated a bit more, and the detail is seen a bit more clearly. It is always a nice practice to keep the texture texels as square as possible.

[oldskoolPunk]

I saw the book written by Ahearn, months ago. In fact, I spent about one hour browsing that book while sipping a cup of coffee at a local Barnes and Nobles bookshop.

I'm currently figuring how to make textures, though.

Hmm, not too many months ago tho, because it was just released....
And about 50% of the book is about "figuring out how to make textures" lol

[dlangdev]

I didn't know there was a new edition until I saw this page...

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?ur ... uke+Ahearn

The gray book was the one I was talking about. It was too advanced for me at that time, tho. Some of what he covered simply passed over me. But I guess I'll be going back there again for a second look.

Mel: I'm having problem setting-up the UV layout at the moment, simply because I'm new at this. I've always done UV layout automagically and paid the price of not learning the proper way. So I'm basically a n00b UV layout artist. Anyway, I'll keep going and learn the hard stuff, hoping quality goes up in the long run. Thanks for the tip, I'll definitely do that.

xray: well, that's true and that was my impression...but the tricky part is dealing with curves. The pixels seem to stretch due to misalignment in UV layout.

One glaring mistake was I should've added more polygons to the column to make it look real. I may re-do the column and throw more polygons to it later. Maybe set it up to have 200 to 400 polygons more.

[dlangdev]

Blindside: I modified effectWrapper (cpp) adding one more RTT for storing gl_position. I can use the position in SSAO shader to calculate the following: dot product of bent normal and sampled point.

[oldskoolPunk]

Holy crap ??? I paid nearly $60 for it

[dlangdev]

Here's a screenshot showing a work-in-progress. I'm re-modeling the scene to get closer to the target texture quality I've been trying to get.

So far, here's the unfinished model.