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Atrium Demo
#421533
04/19/13 00:05
04/19/13 00:05
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Joined: Jul 2001
Posts: 6,904
OP
Senior Expert
Atrium Demo
Hey guys, Alex Pölloth ( Kartoffel) and I present the Atrium Demo for Gamestudio A8. It features the Sponza Atrium scene by Frank Meinl (Crytek), which was reworked and enhanced in Cinema4D and exported to Gamestudio A8 by me; the scene was arranged in WED and comes as WMP file. I also created some textures anew and remastered some other ones; they are all saved as DDS files. Two skycubes from Emil Persson ( Humus) were added, too. All models were split at their hard edges in order to have proper vertex normals. The demo features a day setting with directional sunlight and a night setting with a slight directional moonlight, a handful of colored pointlights and a colored spotlight. The key feature of this demo is not only the Atrium scene itself (it is rather static, though), but the included "fxObj" object shader, which was initially written by Kartoffel and further extended and modified by me. The shader provides per-pixel lighting and shading and supports up to eight directional-, point and spotlights. It supports normalmapping with specular map and detail normalmapping. The shader uses the engine's sun color, the level ambient and fog. The shader is procedural and can be customized for each entity with flags. You can seperately specify if a model has a normal map, a spec map and a detail map or not; if the model should be rendered doublesided (e.g. vegetation); and what kind of surface it has, e.g. if it is a solid surface (e.g. walls) or overlay surfaces (e.g. foliage, plants; activates the OVERLAY flag) or cutout objects (e.g. chain textures), or, if it is a static surface (deactivates the DYNAMIC flag). The order of skins is always 1) diffuse, 2) normal map, 3) spec map and 4) detail normalmap. If you render a distant object, you can even specify that an entity has a normal map, but is rendered without normal mapping. If you don't select any flags, the entity is "just" rendered with per-pixel default lighting - which looks even better than the standard engine lighting! Examples:
action stoneWall ()
{
// static, solid object with normalmapping, specular map and detail normal mapping
fx_obj(my, FX_OBJ_STATIC | FX_OBJ_SOLID | FX_OBJ_NM | FX_OBJ_SPEC | FX_OBJ_DETAIL);
}
action vegetation ()
{
// overlay object with normalmapping, specular map and double sided rendering
fx_obj(my, FX_OBJ_OVERLAY | FX_OBJ_NM | FX_OBJ_SPEC | FX_OBJ_DOUBLE);
}
action lattice ()
{
// cutout object with regular (per-pixel) shading
fx_obj(my, FX_OBJ_CUTOUT);
}
Plus, the demo comes with a sky cube module + shader ("fxSkycube"), that allows you to create skycubes which can be rotated, found by name, displaced and stretched towards the horizon; and other neat stuff. For more images, watch the following slideshow on flickr or download the demo and its sources from here: Atrium Demo v0.01 2013-04-18 (~40 MB)http://www.christian-behrenberg.de/files/dev/demos/atriumdemo-0.01-2013-04-19.zip It was tested with A8.40.3 and we hope that this is useful for anyone. What's next? Well, the project was driven by the need to have a cool multipurpose per-pixel shader that can catch up with commercial games. It looks quiet good, we are pleased with the results. But there is still so much to do and to support (e.g. lightmaps, AO, emissive textures, cubic environment reflections... and so on). Maybe we can pull other demos or enhance this one, I don't know. Though, I have the strong belief that the procedural flag-based approach is a good and convenient one, although I imagine that the interface might change if new features come into play... we'll see.
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Re: Atrium Demo
[Re: Hummel]
#421551
04/19/13 20:35
04/19/13 20:35
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Joined: Jul 2001
Posts: 6,904
HeelX
OP
Senior Expert
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OP
Senior Expert
Joined: Jul 2001
Posts: 6,904
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Thanks for the nice words, PadMalcolm, Dico, Hummel - and Kartoffel!!  I must confess that this was a bit more difficult and time-consuming than I thought. After all this, I am convinced that it is not worth it for indie developers to put time and money into something like this. This demo exists only because the original artist has made the models and textures freely available. During the production of this, I have found other free scenes that are worth it to be ported to Gamestudio and would lead to a further development of the object shader. Though, it is very likely that I am going to extend my post-processing framework and shader collection next. There are a lot of things on my list, like tonemapping, DOF and such. I also believe that it makes no sense to extend the Atrium Demo (or demos in general) with new features just for the sake of it. I think that further development of the shader(s) should come with new polished demos with each iteration. That keeps also the people attracted. But for this artwork have to be free, so that people can look into the files and play with them - everything else makes no sense, like WRS protection. So if someone is willing to create or donate exclusive new 3D models with all the bells and whistles - I would be very grateful! I need for example an animated 3D character so that I can add proper GPU-accelerated bone animation support and/or a skin shader P.S: please don't forget to thank Kartoffel as well. He did a great job and getting the shader started, I learned also a lot from him.
Last edited by HeelX; 04/19/13 20:35.
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Re: Atrium Demo
[Re: Superku]
#421557
04/20/13 05:58
04/20/13 05:58
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Joined: Jul 2001
Posts: 6,904
HeelX
OP
Senior Expert
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OP
Senior Expert
Joined: Jul 2001
Posts: 6,904
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This really should be deployed with every GStudio installation, do you plan to contact jcl (if he himself does not contact you) regarding this? I don't think so. First, the shader is different from how the Gamestudio shaders are written; Second, there are still a lot of basic things missing; and third, I really wait for the new release so that everything can be refactored with a HLSL framework aside which is imported with #include -- about JCL/opgroup: I don't know. They can do whatever they want with it, that is why it's free and that also applies to you 
Last edited by HeelX; 04/20/13 05:59.
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Re: Atrium Demo
[Re: lemming]
#421559
04/20/13 06:41
04/20/13 06:41
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Joined: Mar 2011
Posts: 3,150
Budapest
sivan
Expert
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Expert
Joined: Mar 2011
Posts: 3,150
Budapest
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really cool project, another source we can learn from, thanks. in future, if you decide to work further on it, shadow support would be nice, but maybe it is not too useful as the building is quite closed.
Last edited by sivan; 04/20/13 06:54.
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