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Author Topic: New Feature: "Glow" textures  (Read 70601 times)

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #45 on: April 18, 2010, 10:09:51 pm »
Now my version also works perfectly...  :)
The problem was that I had decompressed old versions of the shaders in base  :-[

Looks very nice.
IMHO this glow could help us push this game into 2084 big time  ;D

Top Work, arisian, & btw. all my questions seem to be answered  ;)

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #46 on: April 18, 2010, 10:11:14 pm »
Easy way to test this is to use the weapon-set of alien soldiers 1  ;)

Offline arisian

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #47 on: April 18, 2010, 10:20:43 pm »
Okay, glowmap textures should now be used for materials and surfaces as well as meshes.  Screenshot attached; note the glow from the top rack of magazines, and the glowing spot on the grass texture.  Note that I have not added these two glow textures to the SVN, as they are not at all useful or appropriate; they were just a proof of concept.  I'll attach them to this post, along with a screenshot, in case anyone is interested.  Now it's up to the artists to start making glowmaps (and everyone else to beta-test and report bugs in the new features) :)

Offline H-Hour

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #48 on: April 18, 2010, 10:37:35 pm »
Thanks Arisian. That's great, and easy to implement from the mapper's side.

Offline BTAxis

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #49 on: April 18, 2010, 10:46:10 pm »
Shouldn't the material system documentation be updated?

Offline arisian

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #50 on: April 18, 2010, 11:02:39 pm »
At the moment, this isn't really integrated with the material system; glow-maps are associated with textures, not materials.  Being able to specify more detailed things about glow in the material system would probably be useful, but I haven't done that yet.

The material system docs should probably be updated, as should the modeling docs.  Also, most of the code I've added has some comments, but could use more, and in general would probably benefit from some cleaning and/or refactoring in places, both for clarity and for optimization.  I wouldn't call any of it "production-ready" code at this point, but it should be enough to let people start figuring out what they can do with it, and what needs to be changed/added so the system accomodates their needs better.  If you want to document things, be my guest ;)  otherwise, I'm inclined to wait until I'm more confident that the code has stabilized before doing lots of documentation.

Artists, modelers, and mappers; if you'd like to be able to do something related to post-processing and can't figure out how, let me know and I'll see how difficult it would be to add.  I welcome feedback about what you do/don't like about the new system; now is the time to comment, while it's still new and flexible.

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #51 on: April 19, 2010, 12:24:24 am »
Hey arisian !
Thanx for this great addition here...
Great effect !
Have to experiment & figure out how to combine the glow with the animations of the material system in the best way now...  ;)  ::)...
« Last Edit: April 19, 2010, 12:34:57 am by MCR »

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #52 on: April 19, 2010, 12:30:49 am »

Materialsystem-animations still working & are fully functional, so both fx can be applied @ the same time...  8)
« Last Edit: April 19, 2010, 12:36:29 am by MCR »

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #53 on: April 19, 2010, 01:01:00 am »
The problem with the animations is just that they 'disappear under the glow'...
I am sure there is a possibility to make the glowmaps glow less with manipulating the glowmap with GIMP, but what I really would like to see would be an addition to the material system to make 'glowmap animations' instead of using the normal property textures...
I hope this is somehow understandable here...  ::)
If you look @ tex_ufo/ufo2_06a0 (currently in trunk) for example. The glow looks great, but it would be nice to make the animation with the glow-map instead the property texture, because now the glowmap 'swallows' the button animation...
This would also add enourmously to the graphical quality of the animations if not only standard but glowing ones would be possible too (not only pseudo-glow with removing lightmaps from property textures) ;)
I will attach some pictures to explain what I mean  ;)...

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #54 on: April 19, 2010, 01:10:19 am »
I hope you understand what I mean, arisian...  ::)
When we have separated button-animations for example already finished (without the 'skins' around them), we already would have perfect glowmap-animations available if the possibility would exist to define those animation frames themselves as glowmaps...
I hope you understand & make this possible ;)
Here an example of a 'already finished' glowmap animation:
« Last Edit: April 19, 2010, 01:13:53 am by MCR »

Offline arisian

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #55 on: April 19, 2010, 01:19:40 am »
I'll work on trying to integrate the glow-maps better with the matterial/animation system, though it may take me a bit to get around to it.  I'm not familiar with the animation system or how it works, so I'll have to learn how it works before I can effectively modify it.

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #56 on: April 19, 2010, 01:23:24 am »
btw, I do not feel like a artist, modeler or mapper, but just like someone who wants to use his allround-talents & skills to improve this project on all fronts...
But I still felt like I had to answer your call for feedback ;)

Thanx again for all those features, I tell you the geoscape looks so great in addition with the ultra mod  ;), I still do not know if I do not want all 12 seasons back  ;)

Mattn, I have not written this  :-[  ::)  ;)  :D  ;D

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #57 on: April 19, 2010, 01:33:41 am »
I'll work on trying to integrate the glow-maps better with the matterial/animation system, though it may take me a bit to get around to it.  I'm not familiar with the animation system or how it works, so I'll have to learn how it works before I can effectively modify it.
YEAH, sounds good to hear that.
I would like to help you, but I just can tell you stuff you already know for sure, so I will  :-X
Just one thing, I am sure you already know of is that doxygen stuff:

http://ufoai.killfile.pl/doxygen/

I find that nice.

Offline arisian

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #58 on: April 19, 2010, 03:56:57 am »
Okay, I think that the frame-based animations should work with glow now.  Each frame of the animation can have its own glow-map, which will be applied when that texture is used (based on the animation sequence/timing parameters).  Transform-based animations (eg. rotate, pulse, stretch, etc.) aren't implemented yet.  I haven't done extensive testing, though, so let me know if you run into issues.

Offline MCR

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Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures
« Reply #59 on: April 19, 2010, 04:09:37 am »
Arisian, that is important !
IMHO we do not need extra glowmaps for each frame of the animation !
With the layered animations we can make the animation frames BE the glowmaps IMO...
Don't you think so ?
When we have a base texture with a screen & buttons for example & we have property texture animations that are separated from each other we can have a normal screen overlay animation for the screen & use the buttons overlay animation frames as glowmaps themselves...

Or is this not better than having to load all the additional glowmaps into memory ?