Posts Tagged ‘pipeline’

Parallax Occlusion Mapping with Adaptive Shadows

parallax-occlusion

The wall has only two polygons. The illusion of depth is done by ray tracing in texture tangent space. Note how the stones occlude each other even if there is no geometry.

Notice also how the shadows adapt to the depth as well. This is done by using virtual displacement of position in shadow mapping.

The second image is debug visualization of the parallax occlusion mapping effect.

The whole pipeline is using deferred shading, which enables scenes with high number of simultaneous dynamic lights (up to 100s). The shadow map rendering code uses caching to eliminate need for rendering shadow maps frequently. This enables that even all lights in the scene are able to cast dynamic shadows.

 

3D Content Viewer for Artists

3d-viewer-controls

Tweaking and debugging is essential part of 3D-content creation as well, and if you provide good tools for the artist you can trust they will be thankful for it. And that is, in turn, great for your game since happy artist means good content. :) The multiRender Viewer here supports also scripting and physics, so a lot of the content can be prototyped here without even launching the game. The Viewer can also be launched within 3dsmax to provide as smooth workflow as possible.

 

3dsmax Pipeline

3dsmax-pipeline

Often problem in content pipelines is that it is more or less cumbersome to get content from 3D-content creation application to the game. You might need 10 steps to get a simple object in game. Often a lot of configuration, for example, export time dialog boxes with exactly correct configuration, is needed. multiRender uses different approach: The content is moved from modeling package as is, and as far down the pipeline as needed all the way up to the rendering level (if needed). This reduces greatly the need for configuration since the usage context is known already when you still have the full data. This also enables fully different level of batch processing, basically all content can be batch-exported and processed (overnight if needed) to the game with a single button press.