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Volumetric and other effects


Noisycricket

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I was curious about the possibility of replicating the volumetric effects of T3 in TDM. There is fog in some missions, but it doesn't seem to look quite the same and there was a lot of what looked like banding. I read somewhere the TDM must process shadows in the cpu. I was curious if that would leave some unused processing power that could by used to call in some other advanced opengl operations without effecting framerate? The other idea was to make an easy way to create the look of a dusty surface on all horizontal surfaces in a given area. Pipe dream?

 

Example from Thief 3

@4:36

http://www.youtube.com/user/veriax#p/c/066BDDDFCE0155A5/45/y7EsUrBSd5o

and

here from the start

http://www.youtube.com/user/veriax#p/c/066BDDDFCE0155A5/61/dijJCUFjuqg

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The banding can be fixed with proper HDR. Maybe JCDenton's work with 1.03 might address that?

 

Calculating shadows on the GPU can be done but it's likely that will have to wait for the engine to go open source.

 

Volumetric beams of light can be done now. There are examples in Doom 3 itself. They're particle effects but it's likely the same trick is used in that first video you posted.

 

The second video looks like your standard OpenGL fog effect or are you talking about the beams shining in through the window?

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@Jdude: I guess i should go learn DR a little more before i go spouting off with all these questions i have.

 

Well those are cleverly designed particle effects I guess. But what do you mean by dusty surface? Dust puffs raising when you walk along? That'd probably be pretty hard to do convincingly.

By dust i meant the matte off-white reflection off of it when light hits heavy dust from an angle. You know how you can see the surface fine when shining a light directly at it, but then when you light a light at it from a shallower angle it gets progressively lighter and harder to see the surface, if not impossible. You might be able to see a decent enough example of it on your desk right now if its been awhile since you've cleaned. ;) But im referring to pretty heavy dust for crypts that could be applied to horizontal surfaces in a selected area. Is that possible?

 

The banding can be fixed with proper HDR. Maybe JCDenton's work with 1.03 might address that?

Unfortunately, i saw the banding in 103, but, good to hear it can be fixed.

 

The second video looks like your standard OpenGL fog effect or are you talking about the beams shining in through the window?

Yeah, i guess just fog i think. I got interested in it after seeing this article in 3DArtist:

 

016g.th.jpg

 

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

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By dust i meant the matte off-white reflection off of it when light hits heavy dust from an angle. You know how you can see the surface fine when shining a light directly at it, but then when you light a light at it from a shallower angle it get progressively lighter. You might be able to see a decent enough example of it on your desk right now if its been awhile since you've cleaned. ;) But im referring to pretty heavy dust for crypts that could be applied to horizontal surfaces in a selected area. Is that possible?

Ah yeah, I get it now. But man that's a tough one. I mean the algorithm for doing that is basically simple. Just perform a linear interpolation between a dusttexture and the original texture depending on lightdirection in relation to the surfacenormal. I've got no clue how one would achieve that through D3-materials. Maybe a cubemap could do it depending on the blendmode. One thing you might also try would be to modulate veeeeeery subtle noise-like variations through the addnormals command on the original normalmap. Because the variations are so subtle, shading of those would only kick in on very steep angles and the edge amplification of JC's new interaction shader could then possibly lead to the desired effect.

 

Unfortunately, i saw the banding in 103, but, good to hear it can be fixed.

It was even there when we used to have real HDR and the problem was that it was even more visible back then. We saved JC the a buttload of work, that would've been necessary to get rid of the banding and settled for HDR-Lite.

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A related Doom3world topic (new)?

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=24150

 

(Interesting new findings about the particle editor or something well known?) :unsure:

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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