| April 3, 2005 1:40: Splines
Basic camera trajectory created. Camera can now move
on predefined splines. This will be used mostly for cutscenes. Splines
currently have fixed number of nodes.
April 1, 2005 14:35: Materials
Photon mapper requires materials with different parameters
for refraction, reflection and so on. So I have started working on material
editor. Here is early material example screenshot.
April 1, 2005 6:25: Photon Mapping
As of 3:00 AM today I have started working on photon
mapping. I must say I'm surprised with the results. When I first started
reading about photon mapping, Monte-Carlo methods etc. I suspected it
will take forever to create decent method. However, after only few hours
of testing, renderer is showing much better results than radiosity processor
I made few weeks back. Photon mapping, just as radiosity, takes forever
to finish, however current version of photon mapper is sadly unoptimized.
There are bunch of improvements to create and I'm still working on basics,
but as soon as I finish I'll upload some screenshots. Stay tuned for more
info :)
March 30, 2005 22:14: Adaptive Tesselator/Tracer
I have started working on adaptive meshes. I plan to
rewrite entire engine to use multilevel geometry. This way you can design
level using parametric brushes, determine level detail and engine will
rewrite entire level geometry and render all lightmaps for specific level
LOD. To view example of current work click here.
March 30, 2005 20:49: Curved surfaces
I have just changed some of the parameters in engine
and now I can create perfectly curved surfaces with no problem :)
BTW. There is slight drawback to current implementation.
Perfectly rounded curves are notoriously hard to compute. Light tracing,
mapping and lightmap sorting for fully detailed scene can last for hours.
It looks I'll have to find alternative methods of rendering. Otherwise
I'll spent entire month rendering full level with all details.
So far I was able to isolate where the problem is. It
seems brushes will need serious recoding...
March 30, 2005 19:00: Site Update
Editor, effects and engine sections are updated with
new texts and images.
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March 30, 2005 12:58: Big Images
Good news for those who prefer big images. You can
view full size (actually 88% size) of all screenshots on this site.
Just click on image to display bigger image.
March 28, 2005 18:03: Test Level
This screenshot is from the new test level. This level is used to
test shadows and environmental lighting.
March 28, 2005 17:11: Spherical Harmonics
Lighting calculations now use spherical harmonics to
calculate per poligon lighting. It's nothing fancy yet, just few simple
calculations. Now I have to figure some nice way to calculate lighting
on curved surfaces.
March 28, 2005 5:29: Raytracer
Raytracing algorithm is slightly upgraded. Some minor light artifacts
are removed. I have also added texturing effects during lightmap calculation.
Now it's possible to apply blur, emboss, sharpen and other framebuffer
effects to all lightmaps during the lightmap creation process. I'm not
quite sure if this will be usefull, but better to have it than not...
March 27, 2005 22:16: Lightmap sorting
Lightmap sorting is finally finished. Editing is not
limited to small sectors anymore. Actually only limitation now is the
maximum texture size supported by hardware. But on GeForceMX2 or stronger
cards this size is 2048 or more pixels which makes it possible to create
fully lit poligons with size greater than 170 meters.
March 27, 2005 16:15: Light Raytracer
Light tracer is upgraded. I'm still working on shadow
sorting and storing but it's a slow work. It looks I'll have to rewrite
half the fricking lighting functions. Anyway, here's another screenshot
from editor. Right now shadows are raytraced in one pass and they have
pretty sharp edges. I'll try to correct this as soon as possible.
March 26, 2005 23:29: Lightmap sorting
Another change in lightmap creation. Lightmaps are now
rendered per poligon, not per sector as before. Since this is the case,
it is possible (in theory :) to use more than one lightmap per sector.
I have changed rendering part of the engine (that was easy part) but now
I have to redesign lightmap calculation to store more lightmaps per sector.
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