Nice work on this so far. Continued improvement as you've gone on.

Other people have mentioned the few areas to tweak with glossiness and so on so I won't, except to say with art sometimes less is more. There is a tendency to exaggerate cool effects like bump and shiny surfaces, but you have to fight that impulse and look at the overall composition as those aberrations sometimes stick out like a sore thumb.

Look forward to seeing more.

Yeah thanks for the suggestions (and slin is playing around with occlusion at the moment; we'll see if we can implement that too) - but we don't want to copy oblivion - in fact I am using a lot more than just oblivion as a reference. In my eyes this design has a lot more from Thief3 than from Oblivion - even though it got some round eddges which are typically of oblivion artwork. But nevertheless, it's an "Inn" from a world I call "The Realm" - which differs a lot from the storys of oblivion, thief or any other game out there.





And for the bumpiness/glossiness: Everything will get a fair bit of both regarding to our taste of things - there is no overall good way to do this, because anyone out there has their special tastes about that. So we have to decide what we would like it to be (and hope others will like that too)

It looks very good so far, but without shadows you can't give the right flare to the scenery. So think about using a good shadowsystem, like dynamic softshadows (if you're able to program them) or use the built-in static shadow system (don't know if this looks good with oll these shaders).

Dark_Samurai

Can't wait to see parallax mapping combined with occlusion, it's actually a smart way the produce simple shadows

Cheers

Frazzle

I had some heavy performence problems with parallax occlusion mapping and am now using relief mapping instead.

The normalmapping shader supports 3 lights in one pass with pixelshadermodel 2.a and has fallback to the same Shader splitted into two passes with pixelshadermodel 2.0.
The relief mapping shader supports 3 lights as well with pixelshadermodel 2.a and has fallback to parallax mapping splitted into two passes with pixelshadermodel 2.0.
Both shaders have also fallback to FFP Bumpmapping, which looks quite okay and to the normal 3DGS rendering (empty technique).
For both shaders, it is taken care of the models ambient value. A glossmap is used and the height, overall glossstrength and gloss intensity can be adjusted per model within WED.

I´m now playing around some more with shadowmapping and hope to get something usefull done for this level.
Btw, at the moment the level runs with ca 90fps on my system

We don´t have a good displacementmap at the moment, but this it what the relief mapping looks like with the one Crazy Bump created for me, wich is because of that far away from perfect:


Slin

Looks impressing!
Reduce the contrast of the displacement map to get a less exaggerated height of the bumps.

btw, i like the look of the relief mapping much more than the paralax one. the reliefmapping gives much more shape

Yeah looks really cool as I already told you

The Displacement Mapping of this Ground Texture is somehow complex to paint, because it is not correctly defined by programs like Crazy Bump or Photoshop. So I have to paint an Ultra High Polygon Model with ZBrush, to get an accurat Displacement Map out of it (which could take some time to complete). Nevertheless... it's worth the hard work

right now it looks as though the carpet is hovering above the ground... maybe you should apply that relief to the carpert as well? the same one that you're applying to the floor? even when you reduce the effect... ? just an idea...

*rofl*
The stones look like a rough mountainside!


@Germanunkol
I think the reason why the carpet looks like it is hovering is in the Stone surface:
Our eye recognizes a rough surface and a total flat carpet above, thus the brain concludes the carpet has to be at least as high as the highest stone part the eye sees, otherwise the stone had to pass the carpet which is not the case.

I think that'll be not so bad when the heightmap is more realistic.