Real Relief

[NecroDOME]

nice!!

[www.sibvrv.com]

Loading maps from Quark finished

[www.sibvrv.com]

Roman, is there any chance that you could explain the technique you are using further or are you keeping it a secret until you release a commercial game with it?

Dominique, thats is not a secret only one problem - i can't write good description in English

:roll: btw, today i have created first physics for engine, with lots of bugs (now trying to fix)
physics materials - metal, wood, brick, glass and cloth.
if shot the glass it crash where bullet damage it about metal - can twist and crash.

[jasonf]

Matey, this is looking damn fine

[Luuk van Venrooij]

I was wondering how he did that cool relief effect and lighting without any shaders. So I quickly created my own version using a heightmap and the standart OGL lighting. Gives some pretty nice results that look like parallax mapping with per pixel lighting.

The demo has 1 surface with 4 rotating lights with different properties.

Screenshot:


Download link:
http://www.genesisdevice.net/downloads/ReliefDemo.zip

[www.sibvrv.com]

I was wondering how he did that cool relief effect and lighting without any shaders. So I quickly created my own version using a heightmap and the standart OGL lighting. Gives some pretty nice results that look like parallax mapping with per pixel lighting.

My Congratulations! You move by my steps

Parallax, bump and "relief"(displace texture) maps are - fake
Real relief - means mesh relief without any fake technologies and you have a good start. Good Luck!

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Thank you. I personally think this looks better than parallax mapping. The problem with this methods is when you look at a steep angle at the surface you can see the edge is flat. To bad the polycount is so high for a single surface.

Also I was pretty impressed with the effects that can be created with the standard OGL lighting system. Never done much with it before, but the results speak for themselves

I am currently working on a simple Wolfenstein like engine to experiment more with this technique. This engine will have 2 render modes. One using only OGL 1.0 (like the demo a few posts back) and one using geometry shaders which are already available though some nvidia extensions on my gf 8800 card. This will be an ARB feature when OGL 3.0 comes allong and allows you the generate/add geometry via shaders.

[21o6]

hi :D

i hope this is of interest.

as the trend always was biased to fooling the user in believing he is seeing something that looks realistic (that's what raster-gfx is all about, after all), techniques like dot3/bump/parallax mapping evolved, because "nobody" "seemed to care" about recreating reality (like making relief from vertices = an object).
of course, speed wasn't there in the past so mapping-techniques had a sense, but as speed increased nobody "switched the system", they just pumped more speed into the pixels, which was - in my eyes - senseless back then and still is now.

today "everybody" is still trying to create ways to let the user see something which isn't "really" there (like the relief via parallax mapping, where the illusion of an object is created ... the "object" is a flat picture).

if the gfx-chip-creators would have pumped more speed into vertex-handling rather than pixels, gfx-coding would be waaay more easy
and gfx would have evolved even further by now (and i wouldn't have stopped coding on x86 :D).

why i am telling you this? because i wanted to make sure you know that G80 is SLOW when it comes to geometry-shaders (so you don't start thinking it could be your fault if it runs slow). no, i do not compare with ATI, i own a 8800 gts 640, which is FAST (oh yeah *gg*) ... but not when it comes to geometry-shading.

... and i wanted to rant a bit *gg*

www.sibvrv.com:
i _really_ like that you are using vertices instead of a mapping technique. it feel's so good that somebody shows what can be done when one does not follow the way of the masses.
thank you for this and inspiring others to follow you :D
the picture looks great (the in-demo-gfx too) and i hope you'll find a technique for making it fast enough so i can watch a demo or something on my notebook with integrated graphics (got 11 fps here *argh* *gg*).

... and sometime's i tend to write more than is needed. sorry for that, i'm just strange :D

[Robert Kosek]

That is a really impressive effect. I still go "wow" when I look at the screenshots.

My primary question is just how efficient can we make this type of effect? I would guess that at a low enough heightmap resolution we could optimize a texture into a display list, and then transform coordinates and render the display list. Or, you could have an intermediary level compiler that turned the world into a static "mesh" based off the textures and heightmaps. You'd loose the deformable walls and such, but you'd be able to blend around corners easier.

At least high-polygonal things aren't as inefficient as swapping around textures.

[Luuk van Venrooij]

A little update on my reliefmapping wolfenstein engine. The engine now has a material and lighting system based on the basic opengl system. The detail of the reliefmapping can be set. This last effects the detail and lighing of the surfaces. The higher the better but at a higher polycount. Also I wrote some stuff to bind surfaces with different angles and materials together. Later this week Ill start working on a mapformat, some spatial partitioning and light management code

Some screens:


Light effects


More light effects. Note the seemles edge.


Different relief details