Today the Rocket Man officially appeared in the engine. He does not have the power to arm his rocket and fire at stuff, but he's rigged and ready to go.
Between compiles I have been experimenting with some tweaked lighting models. One of them is to use pre-baked ambient occlusion texture map and slerp it with the direct lighting model from the sun based on the ambient global term. This results in you seeing more of the rock details, even if the shadow and sun conspire to try and make the entity very dark. Of course setting ambient to zero will give you your striking dark shadows and entity shading again!
Also been watching a few YouTube videos of real rocket launchers to get a feel for what our rockets should feel like. Of course real life and computer games are sometimes worlds apart, but it's good to start somewhere and I've never been one for just copying what some other games do (at least, not as a starting point). That said, I must admit to having watched a few GTA5 rocket fights!
Finally here is something from last night, where I gave the Spec Ops character a glowing eyes illumination map to test the new _I support violently requested by the community. While I was in the code, I also added _O support which now stands for Ambient Occlusion Map support.
I had another shot which I would have liked to share with you which shows one of our character models exhibiting a facial bones problem when in ragdoll mode causing his teeth to multiply by a factor of ten and thrust out of his jaw into the world but that was a little silly...
Why is it I always think of The Running Man and fireball, when I see the rocket man character :) ?
ReplyDeleteThey're running men. Last season's winners.
No, last seasons losers.
Lets hope he can take off his helmet so I can confirm my suspicions ;p
I don't understand why now both the characters don't even hold the gun in their hands it just floats .. It's so unrealistic
ReplyDeleteHi Lee
ReplyDeleteThe pre-baked ambient occlusion lighting looks great but I hope this still uses real time dynamic shadows or an option to use either baked or dynamic shadows.
Thanks for adding support for illumination maps as this is really important especially for sci-fi themed games and characters.
Please can you confirm how to use the _O ambient occlusion textures as I've not used these with any models before. For instance how do you create these textures etc?
It's kind of like a light map but renders darker areas where there are edges and cracks, e.t.c. type Ambient Occlusion Map in Google and you can see some examples. For Reloaded, just drop in a _O texture with your usual D, N, S, I set and it will be incorporated into the entity shader. Real time dynamic multiple shadows both real and pseudo will be added in the future for sure. The AO maps for my test where done in MAX by one of our most talented artists ;)
ReplyDelete"new _I support violently requested by the community."
ReplyDeletelol yay thanks for this Lee! I personally have many many uses for this.