Extremely nice work drew, what program did you use to make the normal maps again?

used polybump, its a free normal tool that comes with the Farcry SDK... important thing is that it uses the same UVW set... its amazing the diffrence a true normal map makes as opposed to a converted texture map.

Yeah, also the photoshop plug-in somehow does weird with some textures I try to make a normal map for...
So I think I'll download the FarCry SDK (or is it included on the dvd?)

Cheers

polybump is part of the sdk download, its a max and maya plugin... you need a very highpoly model that is uvw mapped, create a low version (multires) and run them both through polybump... it can be a frustrating experience, it took my months to finally get it to work with minimal seams and shared UVW.

Mmmm, I doubt my version of 3d max works with it though, but I can't try it out now anyways...
How high poly should it be to have a notable effect? I heard some guys talking rather extreme; from 300.000 polys to 2600 or so...

Going to wait until A6.4 is released with Octree as having some real bad frame rate problems with the sun (ATi 9800 pro's run with 1 fps) before I release the new code, also it's more of an editted shader pack now, looks real mean, especially with bloom. I'll just work on some new scripts and shaders whilst waiting for A6.4...



Matt Coles

Hi

I just tried the Normal mapping PS2.0 code on a level block and the code works awesome!
I'm running it on a Ati 9600 xt.

Great thanks to Matt,Drew,Steampipe and all others who built the code!!!

Btw here is one good link for normal mapping I found :-

http://www.monitorstudios.com/bcloward/tutorials_normal_maps1.html

zazang

Hey Matt or anyone else, 2 questions-

- How can I change the position of the highlite of the light pos object? Ive attached light code to my player but the reflection is offset...
- How can I use fog with this shader?

thanks!

Fog should be easy to incorporate, what do you mean by highlight of the light_pos_object? As the position of the actual light? That depends on what object is casting it and where it is placed. Or the intensity of the highlight?

The specular highlight is calculated in the standard way using the Blinn simplification..it based on the halfvector between the angle of light incidence and view position...theres no reason to move it around. The lighting should be correct from all angles.

Using fog is not difficult. just add this stuff to the first pass:
fist declare these at he beginning:
float4 vecViewPos;
float4 vecFog;

thi in the vs output struct:
float Fog : FOG;

then in the vertex shader:
float ofog = 1 - (distance(PosWorld, vecViewPos) - vecFog.x) * (vecFog.z);
Out.Fog = ofog;

now you must do the same thing for the otehr passes, except vertex shaders put this instead:
Out.Fog = 10000;
the resaon is you only want to calculate foging correctly one the first pass, the passes you make fog way way out so it is bascially disabled. Then you should get corect fog color. Just make sure you lights arent visible form a long way away.