Hello, tonight, it's me !
First of all, as you could see, development of tv6.5 is really great currently, the special effects are being added.
Arli talked about the easy bumpmapping for meshs and actors in the last diaries. Now here are some real things in action.
http://www.truevision3d.com/wip/offsetbump-video.avihttp://www.truevision3d.com/wip/normalbump-video.avi(needs DivX codec 5.1.1)
These videos show you how bumpmapping can improve the lighting of your indoor scenes. And it's extremely easy to make such effect in TV3D6.5 now. It took to Arli not more than 10 minutes to make this scene, from 3dsmax exporting in TVM via the new export plugin to coding the simple code in Delphi. The videos were recorded in 30fps but the engine runs the code at more than 300fps (which is not bad really)
Did I say simple code ?
Yep, bumpmapping lighting is standard in TV3D6.5, it's treated as a lighting mode and it's managed like others (when I say managed, I mean that the engine sorts the light and take the nearest / most important ones for each mesh). The bumpmapping code works under VS1.1/PS2.0 at the moment, which limits its utilitation to DX9-level cards, but needless to say that PS1.1 versions are being worked on, so that it can work on GF3+ hardware ( remember that most of the screenshots in WIP sections were taken with a GF4Ti ).
You noticed that there are two videos. What's the difference between both? Simple. One uses the normal tangential bumpmapping techinque, the other uses offset bumpmapping. I'm not sure if you saw all the fuss about offset mapping the last months, it's a sort of new method that have been invented to improve the quality of the bumpmapping effect. It actually displaces a little the base texture coordinates in order to follow the relief on the bumpmap, which looks better to our eyes, and gives an impression of depth. Only drawbacks with this method is it absolutely needs a PS2.0 capable cards, but as we are thinking to the future, it's good to have already this.
Notice that all lights are dynamic this way, and you can move / remove / change colors of them in real time, that's the good thing about bump lighting !
Else I'm currently working on implementing the new stencil shadow system, which could be faster :p (I said "should"), because on the one hand, it will be powered by vertex shaders if possible (to help to make the GPU work in parallel with the CPU -> faster), and on the other hand, shadows will be grouped by lights and not by models like before. It will support also features like DX9 Two sided stencil operations (reducing the vertex thoughtput by 2) and bounding box optimizations to make all faster.
The new stencil shadows system is going to be simplified, no need for RenderShadow for each mesh at the good place etc.. the engine will all do itself in the Mesh.Render or Globals.FinalizeShadows functions.
We will come back with new videos/screesnhots when shadows are really in
I hope I've been quite clear in what I said... And have fun watching the videos !
