Small island

Posted By: ChrisB

Small island - 09/27/06 22:30

This is an small island with several shaders in screen, includes Water shader (reflect and refract), grass shader, terrain shader, heat haze shader, normal mapping.
I think i will make a screensaver out of it, or maybe i will release it as a shader collection (but first i must do some own artwork).
Here are some screenshots:








The palms are from loopix. The day night shift looks still ugly (must do some cool sun bitmaps), i'm also working on a better sky.

What do think about the theme? Its not a tropical island!
Posted By: Matt_Coles

Re: Small island - 09/27/06 22:38

looks very nice, i especially like the grass fur shader
Posted By: Pappenheimer

Re: Small island - 09/27/06 22:44

Can't wait to see the demo!

I'm curious how the grass looks in realtime.

If it is _not_ a tropical island then you should remove the palm and the stone heads, because they are associated with the south!
Posted By: Michael_Schwarz

Re: Small island - 09/27/06 22:49

that looks very nice, especially the grass fur shader.
What about the framerate?
Posted By: Damocles

Re: Small island - 09/27/06 22:59

I would need to see this in motion,
I am a bit doubtfull that the fur shader looks like
grass, and not like an animals fur.

Anyway, the screenshots have a nice setting.
You migt want to brithen up the sky, given the contrast
of the shadow/sunny terrain.
The sky is too dark for this strong sun/shadow contrast.
Posted By: DavidLancaster

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 03:15

This is a good showcase of putting together a bunch of shaders. It looks very nice. Did you use sphere for the shadows?
Posted By: TheExpert

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 07:45

very good

but for grass i personnaly prefer grass billboards animated with wind.
your grass shader (furr) looks strange in fact nad do not represent real grass.

take a look at that to see what very good grass looks :
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=24574
Posted By: EX Citer

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 07:47

The fur/grass shader looks nice. It gives the terrain a nice sturcture. Didnīt thought it would be useful for grass because it wasnīt mask able and a little slow espacially the closer the camera got. I canīt see the bump mapping anywhere. The refraction may look good, but I canīt say, because I donīt know the motion.
Posted By: FBL

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 08:09

The dhadow of one of the stones seems to be off - maybe the stone is not placed on the floor correctly.
I'm also not sure about the terrain shader, it makes the grass look a bit blurry, which I personally think destroys the overall look a bit. MAybe it looks different inmotion or it's just the JPG compression.

Apart from that it looks very nice.
Are the shadows done with your own DLL?
Posted By: TheExpert

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 08:50

i really prefer that :

lot of grass

the shader fur is good only for small grass height.
Posted By: sPlKe

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 09:29

looks okay. the shadows are a bit awkward, and one of the sttues hangs in the air, or the shadow placing is off. the water could use a little less transparency, and the overall design is a bit empty.

ont eh other side, the shaders look pretty good, and the colours do too. if you finx the mentoined issues, it is very very good^^
Posted By: ChrisB

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 11:44

Thx for the comments.
South don't mean tropical. My parents have some palms in their garden and germany is definitely not tropical.
As you can see i'm using the beta version (hope jcl don't see this ), i get on my pc (Pentium D 2*2.8ghz, Geforce 6600) 15-30fps (depends how much is visible, remember this is not a game, and the shader are not optimized for a game). The grass fur shader is slow (the terrain gets rendered 7 times!) but i will include several quality options so it will run also on older pcs fast enough. (i test it on an P3 800mhz, Radeon 9550, and it runs there on low quality at 15-20fps)

About the fur shader: yes it depends on the view angle and the distance. sometimes it looks odd.
I first implement something like that on the screens from The"Expert", but i don't like it (ok maybe just because i don't have good looking grass textures).




I'm using an own developed shadowmapping plugin. and yes the head was floating in the air.
Posted By: TheExpert

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 12:11

what is the resolution ?

If nothing was particulary optimized :
perhaps finally 3DGS have gained some good speed

Good things for 3DGS fans (i think i'm one also even with my bad
posts) !
Posted By: PHeMoX

Re: Small island - 09/28/06 13:39

Chrisb, looking really good! I'd really like to see it in motion. Btw, that water shader is begging for a nice white wash at the shores!! Or some transparency (maybe even both ).

Quote:

i really prefer that :

lot of grass

the shader fur is good only for small grass height.



Lol, talking about a overkill of grass hehehe, that's way too much for a realtime game ... or at least I think so ..

Cheers
Posted By: ChrisB

Re: Small island - 10/09/06 19:55

Ok, because the sky (especially the clouds) takes longer than expected here are some shots of the shore line from last week.




note: no shadows, no grass and low sized terrain in this screens.
Posted By: EpsiloN

Re: Small island - 10/09/06 20:10

Beautiful how is the fps without and with shadows,grass...?
Posted By: EX Citer

Re: Small island - 10/09/06 20:28

How did you made the shore line (the white foam)? Looks very good.
Posted By: cartoon_baboon

Re: Small island - 10/09/06 20:30

Quote:

How did you made the shore line (the white foam)? Looks very good.


Yeah that's what I was wondering as well...
Posted By: PHeMoX

Re: Small island - 10/09/06 20:59

WOW!! Awesome work man! What's the framerate on this?

Cheers
Posted By: nipx

Re: Small island - 10/09/06 21:07

your foam is absolute BEAUTIFUL! How did you make it?

2nd screen: The water looks very good but (imao) a bit plastic.

nipx
Posted By: sTOOs

Re: Small island - 10/10/06 17:44

gefällt mir sehr gut.
Posted By: XNASorcerer

Re: Small island - 10/10/06 18:34

I would like to know how did you make the shore line also?

Beautifull work!
Posted By: Michael_Schwarz

Re: Small island - 10/10/06 18:44

he told us/me how he did it in the 3dgs IRC channel.. haha!

scnr
Posted By: cartoon_baboon

Re: Small island - 10/10/06 21:46

@ Michael: grrr...
Posted By: ChrisB

Re: Small island - 10/11/06 20:18

Thanks for the kind words.
My method is defenitly not the best, it works good on this small island but if you many of thems (several terrains) or a big coast you should improve it or do it another way.

If you want an autamated process you should read this: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=281637
(note: this is not 3dgs specific but it shows you the right direction)
Ok, the dumb way (good enough for this island level):
export your terrain mesh and import it in Cinema4D (or any other modell editor)
Delete the faces over and under the shore line, or for better quality (but more polys (500 or 2000 polys don't really matter for a small scene)) use boolean function like you can see in this shot:

you get a mesh like this:

Now assign this mesh in cinema a new material using the cylinder mapping method, so that the foam texture later go around the island.
Export it, import it into med, add your foam texture and save it as an mdl, then use an function which sets the vertecs of your shoreline slightly higher than the terrain and water.
Last but not least scroll your foam texture with an fixed function effekt or if you are using standart or a5 use the .u .v parameters (of course you can do some fancy blending and wabbling function with a shader if you want).
Thats all.
Posted By: Uhrwerk

Re: Small island - 10/11/06 20:32

KISS = Keep it simple and stupid.

Stunning, that a such a nice effect can be achieved with such an easy trick. Great work, ChrisB.

Mind to post a small video to see this in action?
Posted By: cartoon_baboon

Re: Small island - 10/11/06 20:46

Well thanks alot for that CB - I was having trouble getting seafoam effect actually to follow my terrain. WIll give it a try ^^
Posted By: XNASorcerer

Re: Small island - 10/11/06 21:19

Thank you
Posted By: PHeMoX

Re: Small island - 10/11/06 22:38

Lol, and I kept thinking it was a smart ass über pro shader, again great great work on the effect, it looks ridiculously awesome and it's done so simple, thanks for explaining how you did this!! You tha man!

Cheers
Posted By: EX Citer

Re: Small island - 10/12/06 09:08

Thanks. Didnīt knew that cylindrical mapping can be used that way. Good to know.

@Zeitwerk: KISS = Keep it short and simple (thatīs the correct meaning of KISS)
Posted By: PHeMoX

Re: Small island - 10/12/06 15:42

One question, you use cylindric mapping and then only change the u v map position right? I didn't actually start trying this out yet, but would this work by moving the skin in only 1 direction? (Would it automatically move right according to it's direction land inwards?)

Cheers
Posted By: cartoon_baboon

Re: Small island - 10/12/06 19:47

yes it will. if for example the ridge of foam is the top of the image you are using as texture then if you use cilindircal mapping the ridge will be pointing inward. changing the v (or U?) will then displace the texture upwards or downwards and thus inland or away from the island.
Posted By: BlueBeast

Re: Small island - 10/13/06 13:34

I havnt see a single picture yet
Posted By: themgsman

Re: Small island - 10/17/06 03:32

Very nice island. I especially like the water shader. I would have to agree though that the grass does look blurred in the photos and takes away from the overall effect. Perhaps that is just in the photos. What shaders did you use for this? are they your own or did you get them from somewhere else? I would be interested if they were ever released as a set or something.
Posted By: Matt_Aufderheide

Re: Small island - 10/17/06 03:45

Doing grass in that way is a bad idea for a number of reasons.. first it doesnt really look convincing as grass, more just a trick. Also it is very slow becasue of all the multiple rendering of the terrain and overdraw.
Posted By: PHeMoX

Re: Small island - 10/17/06 13:12

Does anyone know a cheap or free modeler which can do this type of bolean cutting? I'm not getting satisfactionary results with Wings3D here .. Would be nice if there's a free modeler which can do this,

Cheers
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