J.C.Denton

This looks amazing! It does work with HDR but doesn't work with the new ambient nor with the texture brightness method. I haven't gone through all the posts made here. So I don't have any grasp over this. I'd appreciate if someone points me to few informative posts or even wiki that explains how this works. Doom 3 amazes me all the time with the stuff like this. Judging from the old materials similar to the one used in the map above, there seems to be some tests id made back when they were working on D3. It'd be cool if it can be combined with some image space lighting, so that the static geometry and characters can have environment's reflection, similar to the new ambient lighting (see this image for example).

Good point. But the part where the ash heap starts fading, it will start fading to darker shade until it reaches black and not the transparent background. Edit: But that also means we can try mapping _currentRender with the inverseVertexColor part. This approach, if worked, might cause particles to not draw over blended part since stages referring to _currentRender are always drawn in the end and thus any particles or other alpha blended stuff which is overlapping this portion will be overwritten by the vertexblend.

nodraw as the name suggests won't draw anything. It's used to toggle the display of some things like, flashlight-beam particle on off.

The renderer code is not at all exposed in SDK. Making lit alpha blended surfaces would require a complete re-arrange of current rendering order. There needs to be a lot of feasibility study done (might take a man-month or two) to evaluate whether we can have our custom render path with what's exposed. I think that there's a fair chance of this being possible. We can do a lot of things faster and good looking in addition to feature you wanted.

Tried a lot of different combination and even wrote a shader to do the blending, but to no avail. Doom 3 does provide a rather crude lit alpha blended surfaces, wherein the opacity of the surface is determined by the lighting itself. I mean, full bright is fully opaque, completely dark is totally transparent. However, the problem that you are facing does necessarily requires alpha blending on lit surfaces. You can use vertex blending to achieve the kind of surface blending you want. Make the floor and the elevated geometry the same mesh in any third party software (3dsMax for instance). paint the vertices of floor as black and the elevated surfaces as white. Export your geometry and the vertex color will be used by doom 3. Then write a material for this surface based on following format : shaderDemos/vertexBlend { { blend bumpmap map addnormals( textures/base_wall/bluetex3e_local.tga, heightmap( textures/base_wall/bluetex3ebmp.tga, 6 ) ) } { blend diffusemap map textures/base_wall/dlongwall_d.tga vertexColor } { blend diffusemap map textures/base_wall/redtex1dif.tga inverseVertexColor } } OR haderDemos/blendBumpMap { // blended part { blend bumpmap map heightmap (textures/rock/skysand1_bmp.tga, 4) // note that you do NOT put vertexColor on the bumpmap } { blend diffusemap map textures/rock/skysand1_d.tga vertexColor } { blend specularmap map textures/rock/skysand1_s.tga vertexColor } // inverse blended part { blend bumpmap map models/seneca/textures/factoutwall1_local.tga } { blend diffusemap map models/seneca/textures/factoutwall1_d.tga inverseVertexColor } } You'll get a surface that blends textures between the border where vertices are black on one side and white on the other. Sorry, I couldn't do it myself. I am not good at modeling at all.

Oh, now I've got a clear idea of what you wanted to do. The blend modulate works if you want a decal to blend with destination surface and to match with it's lighting. I'll like to try to get the desired result if you could provide me with your test map, materials, textures etc, before writing the engine off on this.

Sorry mate, I dont have the SVN assets at home. I have a limited download connection here. The assets are on my office laptop, which I left back in office. So I 'll help you but I can't actually look at the material. The decal texture should have a color painted on the borders as you wanted it, and should have white color where you want it to be fully transparent. Don't put any alpha channel in the texture. Now, in your material, you'll have to use blend modulate. This way the colored decal would be multiplied with the destination color (which should be your dynamically lit suface, such as floor for instance). The white colored part will multiply with destination and won't change it's color, since anything multiplied with one is itself. the colored part of your decal will modulate the destination surface. You may have to tweak the colored part to get a desired result.

No, the light does interact with it. Stand in front of a web and set r_lightscale to 0 and you wont see it. You can see things like light-bulb textures, lava etc when r_lightscale is 0 but not the web. It's only visible when lit. Additionally, You can find the spider web material being used in business as usual map, in the basement of your apartment. No. Alpha testing has to be used if you want to cast and receive shadows from the material, e.g. hellmaggot particle effect in the first hell level. It uses alpha which is treated as binary, on or off, and it cast and receives shadows. Alpha testing is necessary to generate depth information of solid geomety, which is used for shadows among other things. I quick checked the web texture and even to my surprise it doesn't have an alpha map. The translucency is achieved by the color gradient itself. Have a look at the material of this web, as you can see there's absolutely no alpha testing enabled on this material. models/mapobjects/webs/corner { qer_editorimage models/mapobjects/webs/corner.tga noSelfShadow noshadows nonsolid twosided translucent diffusemap models/mapobjects/webs/corner.tga //specularmap models/mapobjects/webs/corner.tga //bumpmap heightmap(models/mapobjects/webs/corner.tga , 1 ) }

It's already supported by the engine. Look for the material of Hellkinight's gobber, or even better, the spider webs. Ever pointed flashlight at them? they react to light.

This is usually due to wrong use of renderSystem->CropRenderSize function in the code itself. If in your code, you are using a renderSystem->CropRenderSize then there must be one renderSystem->uncrop called for every CropRenderSize used. It's like nesting brackets, e.g. for every opening bracket you need a closing bracket. Have you compiled code on your own? If so, make sure the code is in complete sync with SVN.

Thanks guys. When I first implemented the HDR, I also spent quite a while in that room just looking at the fireplace and stuff. btw, Bikerdude did get to try it the lighting out yet?

AO maps can be really small in size. They'll look blurry due to bi-linear filtering but that goes well with AO. So texture size won't be much of problem. UV unwrap could definitely be an issue. To work around the problem of having to make entire level one object, level can be broken into different objects, but again that's cumbersome task. As it seems, there has to be a built in AO generator in the editor itself. You don't need a light to compute AO.

Aah, I was thinking along the same line. Why not bake ambient occlusion this way? Visuals would definitely drastically improve. I had also started a thread that talked about baking AO in textures: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/10720-texture-creation-suggestion-the-generation-leap/page__view__getnewpost__fromsearch__1 Right now AO like effect on map geometry is achieved by painting grime decals which is very cumbersome and time consuming. We can follow above approach to obtain AO for map geometry.

Very true. I haven't said that's easy, I have said that's what can be done without any code changes. However, process of extracting AO from textures and baking AO to textures can be batched with a script or macro. Also, computing AO for characters and static objects shouldn't be a problem. In fact, that'd give the game an instant visual improvement.

Thanks STiFU! I have updated the first post as you suggested. I tried putting the nested list but it didn't work for me. I tried it with the icon button in the post editor and not with actual hand written tags. Oh well.