But can someone look at this screenshot from Viva Pinata and tell me what's going on here shader-wise? How would you reproduce this scene in A6 using shaders?

Especially curious about:

1. The glove shaped house in the BG
2. The pumpkins highlights and texture (is that normal mapped? if so, why is it matte and not glossy?) The little zig-zag pattern looks like it is a bump map?
3. The grass (is that somehing like a fur shader going on?)
4. Those vine shadows on the pumpkins

This game is really cute loookin

well, the enviroment contains a bloom shader (at least i think) the grass i guess is some sort of fur shader but verry short and combined with multitexture i guess.

*) Bloom + Fog + soft-shadows
1) Normal mapped + Specular lighting
2) Normal-mapped
3) fur + multi-tex
4) [again] soft-shadows

normal maps don't have to be glossy , most of the time you see this is here in the forum, where people don't create specular maps [alpha channel of normal map]. The specular channel controls the "glossy"ness

The "bloom" thing on the 'hand-house' looks more like realtime ambient occlusion to me, bloom has a light overexposure to it usually.

Cheers

Copied from Guitar

*) Bloom/HDR + Per-Pixel Fog + soft-shadows
1) As normalmapping cant change the shape, I would say this house has actually many polygons + maybe baked AO
2) Normal-mapped
3) fur + multi-tex per noise map
4) [again] soft-shadows

BTW wow, cool scene

I love the shadows on the grassy fur areas... other levels in the game have even cooler swirly effects inthe grass





Pretty whimsical for XBox!

So it's probably the same things going on in these screenshots as well then? In terms of getting something like this in A6-- is soft shadows the big thing we are missing?

What makes you guys think there is ambient occlusion on that house? To me, it looks like a somewhat highpoly model with normalmapping and specularity.

btw, 'soft shadows' is not really an accurate description. Soft shadows can come from lightmapping, shadowmapping or shadow volumes. I guess (but can't be sure) they used a global shadowmapping shader.

I think the athmosphere of this game is caused mainly by the colors and style they used.

EDIT: after looking at those last screenshots (wheren't there when I posted), I can say it looks like shadowmapping with percentage-closer filtering.

We aren't really missing anything in gamestudio, you just have to write those shaders.. You might say "yes but an engine should provide shaders X and Y". In reality, however, you will need a different shader for almost all models. Using 'uber shaders', like the recently released normalmapping shader is a bad idea because it does many more things than you need, slowing it down. If you want to create a scene like that, you will have to do shader programming anyways, and all those shaders are freely available on the web, you'll just have to edit them to work with gamestudio and suit your specific needs.

Again, you are probably right, but (normal mapping combined with) ambient occlusion without diffuse illumination
can produce very very similar effects, I've done this in some renders.

Cheers