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Lamps without shadows


sparhawk

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Well, moving shadows would make a neat prefab. I could give it a shot, moving it with an osscilator?
I meant scrolling the projected texture (through the material definition, in case you meant something else). The water materials are a good example for this.

 

The tiling comment was concerning the landscape. It sticks out at least in the screenshot.

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"Clamp" just makes everything outside the texture bounds transparent.

 

Technically it makes everything outside the texture bounds the same colour as the row of pixels at the edge of the texture; the precise effect this has depends on the blend mode and the texture.

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Wowsa, cool. I think that could be used for soft shadows for candles?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Take a look, It turned out better than I thought. I bound a light to the bottom of the candle holder. I should have made the radius a lot bigger, though, so it casts a wider shadow on walls farther away. Since it's a "blend blend" blend light it blends at both ends so you won't have an ugly not-blending edge blend light to blend.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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Take a look, It turned out better than I thought. I bound a light to the bottom of the candle holder. I should have made the radius a lot bigger, though, so it casts a wider shadow on walls farther away.

 

Very good; that's exactly how I imagine these projected blendlight shadows being used.

 

Since it's a "blend blend" blend light it blends at both ends so you won't have an ugly not-blending edge blend light to blend.

 

:wacko:

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Take a look, It turned out better than I thought. I bound a light to the bottom of the candle holder.

 

Awesome (agree it should be a bit bigger). Does it turn of if the candle is extingusihed?

 

You could do me a favor and put it on the candles by default, tho i think that will be shot down by the "oh it will use up resources and slow things down" crowd..

 

Since it's a "blend blend" blend light it blends at both ends so you won't have an ugly not-blending edge blend light to blend.

 

But will it blend?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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This map is starting to turn into a WIP. I discovered some old vacation pictures of Yosemite Falls Park when I was a Kindergartener. Inspiration attack!

 

And to complete the concept: these blend blend lights' "soft shadows" do affect the lightgem properly.

 

post-2515-1241975075_thumb.jpg

 

The only problem I'm running into is texture tiling. The greatest size texture I could feasibly use is 2048x2048 (for the sake of those with an old ATI card: that's the max size) and nobody has free tiling ones with bumpmaps and UV maps. I can hide tiling with some fancy layered patches to an extent, but a larger texture makes it twice as easy.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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And to complete the concept: these blend blend lights' "soft shadows" do affect the lightgem properly.

 

I would certainly expect them to; the lightgem is uses the Doom 3 renderer itself, so anything you see the lightgem should react to.

 

The only problem I'm running into is texture tiling. The greatest size texture I could feasibly use is 2048x2048 (for the sake of those with an old ATI card: that's the max size) and nobody has free tiling ones with bumpmaps and UV maps. I can hide tiling with some fancy layered patches to an extent, but a larger texture makes it twice as easy.

 

You need to stop thinking larger textures and start thinking more textures, by breaking up the geometry into sections with different textures, adding vegetation, rocks or tree models, use dirt or vegetation decals (I guess this is what you meant by layered patches), or even modelling some terrain and use vertex blending to produce smooth texture transitions, if you can face the idea of using a 3D app.

 

Any time you have a large area with a single texture you are going to get tiling artifacts, so using these kinds of methods is helpful to avoid this. I am replaying Half-Life 2 at the moment, and I keep noticing areas where tiling artifacts exist, even in a finished game.

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For the record, Doom 3 does have a hook to allow megatextures for this issue, and there's a demo map out there if you want to see it in action. But I'm not suggesting you do this for this map just for this one area; it's sort of overkill for just one area, might take a ton of work to get setup right, and I read that they take up quite a bit of space (since D3 doesn't compress them).

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Well, a 1024x1024 texture =

~8mb diffuse map

~8mb bump map

~4-mb UV map

--------

20+ mb!

 

that's a lot of video memory taken up!

 

Maybe I can make some grass sprites (probably a model of multiple tufts of grass) that will fade out with distance (the func_static fading trick) similar to how HL2 and Oblivion made standing grass fade out. Everything farther away can be occluded by other vegetation, etc.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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Well, a 1024x1024 texture =

~8mb diffuse map

~8mb bump map

~4-mb UV map

--------

20+ mb!

Huh, what do you mean with a 4 MB U/V map?

 

Also, a 1024x1024 texture takes 4 bytes (RGBA) per pixel => ~ 4 MB uncompressed.

 

And even that is not quite the amount of graphics memory used, the graphics cards will employ a different format internally, which takes up less space. It's about one third of the uncompressed texture size.

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What I meant is that each shouldn't necessarily need the same resolution as the original diffuse map. IF you look at some of the Penumbra Overture assets, they would see textures with an assortment like a 512x512 diffuse map tga, a 512x512 normal map, and a 256x256 UV map.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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I don't know what you're referring to as a "UV map", but it definitely isn't right. Are you talking about the specular map perhaps, or the editor preview image?

 

You're correct that not all of the images need to have the same resolution. Generally it's best for the normal map to have the highest resolution, while the diffuse and specular can be 1/2 and 1/4 size respectively, maybe less if there isn't that much detail involved.

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  • 6 years later...

Did some experiments of my own, and it seems that blend lights are actually quite powerful, because they can use any blend mode, not just "blend blend".

 

For example (in all these shots, the light is in the far right corner, and affects the rear and floor surfaces but not the left wall):

 

Brighten existing light in an area (blend gl_dst_color, gl_one)

brighten.jpg

 

Darken light in an area (blend filter) EDIT: actually this is blend blend, hence the bright area, but blend filter would be better for darkening an area.

darken.jpg

 

Project a shadow (blend filter) -- this is what we are talking about with the lamp shadow

shadow.jpg

 

Wash out colours in an area (blend blend)

washout.jpg

 

Apply a colour cast to an area (blend filter)

colourm.jpg

 

Basically they are like 3D volumetric decals; instead of affecting only what is below them, they affect everything within the light volume (and any triangles which extend outside, normal rules about light culling apply).

@Orbs any chance of fixing the image links..?

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