Hello, not much for this week actually....
- I have just coded a lightmap generator that is able to work on any mesh (anything from the TVMesh class). Just a call to GenerateLightMap(256,256,true) and here you go, the mesh is lightmapped and the good multitexturing is setup for lightmapping. The algorimth for that uses a quite fast triangle rasterization and try to regroup triangles in faces, so that hardware optimizations still work. Then all the small lightmaps are grouped into a big lightmap texture, this way usually you use one lightmap per mesh. For now the collision/raytracing isn't done, so we can have shadows on it, but it will come soon. I plan to add support for normal map later on. This mesh & lightmap texture can be saved as TVM (new engine format) and reloaded without recomputing the lightmap.
As you can see on this early screenshot, the lightmaps are quite standard and are done with a direct lighting algorithm (no radiosity yet, it's too slow), but results are still very good.
This second screenshot is another room, with a diffuse texture this time.
Well you will say, a lightmap generator in a week isn't much... right you're right. So no I didn't do only that... I've also worked on a new water effect with the mesh shader system. (this effect will be included as TV preset effects though). This is a Bumpmapped water that does reflection and refraction of water. It uses for now two passes and 2 render surfaces that needs to be updated every 4 frames (one for reflection, one for refraction). The bumpmap is of course animated and can be tweaked as you want. The effect switchs between refraction and reflection according to a value called Fresnel term that is computed per vertex in the vertex shader.
This screenshot shows a quite dark room (still made with lightmap generator), with this water effect. Here you can see that the water is a plane, but you can adapt it to any surface actually, but it needs to be quite tesselated, else you can see some artifacts and unwanted distortions.
This is the same room with a better lighting, you can see the mix of reflection and refraction, which gives a quite realistic thing I find.
Of course, water in a room like that isn't really exciting, actually I used that room to show you, simply, first to show the new lightmapping feature, but also because the landscape for tv6.5 isn't started yet. It's gonna take a while before I start really this, but I guess the results will be excellent in outdoors.
That's enough for today, now the next thing to do is to do research on the new animation format that should support bones and morphing at the same time (for facial animations or anything like that)... Keep listening !
