Something important for TSE'ers like me

[dEaThMaStEr]

Hey, this is something I think would be pretty damn vital all in all..

I just saw a post and the next update on TSE, lighting and shadows, is on its way. And with that comes dynamic lighting and Shadows on terrains! Great news!

However... For people who like to use unique textures like me, this means a MASSIVE loss in detail. A shit load of light detail is added through bumpmaps generated by the terrain normals and bumpmapping in the lightmap process. I plan a full dynamic day/night system and so I can't use lighting baked into the textures anymore, so all things lightmapping become unneeded. This spells out detail-doom for people like me.

However, I can always export the terrain normals and get that loaded in along with the texture and normal map the terrain with that. Catch there is, the normal maps from the lightmapping process aren't on there last I checked. So theres a ton of loss right there. And also, theres no support for a high res terrain normals export. I've tried this before and the aliasing across those distances becomes god-awful, however L3DT pulls it off quite nicly in the high-res lightmapping.

So basically what I'm asking is climate-defined normal maps merged with the terrain normals file, able to be specified at high res, and for the main terrain normal map to be exported and a high but smooth res for use. With TSE as a large part of the L3DT using crowd and growing over there, this would be a WONDERFUL help! Thanks!

[Aaron]

Hi dEaThMaStEr,

Can do. It's now on the to-do list for v2.4b.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[dEaThMaStEr]

Awesome, you rock dude!

[Aaron]

Hello,

I've finished the high-res normal-mapping/bump-mapping algorithm, but I've yet to make the user-interface (one more wizard.) It will all be included in the next release.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[dEaThMaStEr]

sometimes the speed at which you work is somewhat frightening....

[dEaThMaStEr]

Well, unfortunate news.. I found out today that what I saw was actually a poor sentence structure that made mis-reading it very likely. Turns out it won't be supporting dynaimc shadowing on terrains like I'd hoped. :/

However, fear not Aaron, your work will not go in vain. From what I've been told, the shadowing code is very well flexable and working it out to shadow the terrain wouldn't be hard at all. So once the code is released, hopefully dynamic shadows will be very soon to follow!

[bengarney]

Doing dynamic shadowing on the whole terrain is probably a bad idea - just baking lightmaps et al in is much more performant. You'll notice that not even Quake Wars is doing fully dynamic terrain lighting!

If you do find a good way to do that, I'd love to hear about it, though.

Having normal map info available is pretty cool, though - should be possible to get some impressive results although it'll be costly to render it.

[dEaThMaStEr]

*gasp*

Ben Garney himself! On L3DT! haha

But yes, I understand 100% it'll be costly. I've always been one of those "ends justifies the means" kinda people though. With hardware tech constantly growing, things are always faster and faster. Speed is NO concern for me, I want the full looks! And I know I'm not alone in it; mark my words, if the tech is made available, people WILL come to it.

Heh, should've learned that about me with my water. Even though its slow, it looks great, so I love it and live by it.

[DeathTwister]

ROTFL and then chuckles.............

DT

[Aaron]

Hello Ben,

Welcome to our humble forum, and thank-you for dropping by.

I’ll have to agree that run-time terrain shadow-mapping is well beyond current or foreseeable hardware. Even if the performance was available, one would probably rather expend it on more interesting shaders, physics, larger maps, etc.

What if we take shadow-casting out of the problem - if L3DT provides a high-res normal map and a high-res shadow map, could these be combined at runtime with reasonable performance? This might allow the users to vary the lighting colour dynamically, although not the direction. High-res normals might also be useful for close-to-the-camera shading of secondary lights like torches, bomb-flashes, etc. Just a thought.

Anyway, since I’m not writing the shader code it’s all very easy for me to suggest these things . I guess if I throw the data out there, some brave, brilliant and/or mad souls will find something interesting to do with it all.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[TheMeatMan]

Yes, please include them Aaron. While Torque may not do it, some of us may be writing shaders that do.

[Aaron]

Hi TheMeatMan,

Oops, I forgot to mention I'd finished this already. High-res normal maps with baked-on bump maps are an option in the dev-build of L3DT Professional (currently v2.4.1.12).

However, I kind of forgot about exporting the high-res shadow maps (now on the to-do list for v2.4c). At the moment high-res shadow maps are generated but can't be accessed directly, unless you make a mosaic light-map, in which case they would be saved in the 'Temp\ShadowMap' subdirectory in your map folder. They are saved as 8-bit PNGs, where 0 is no shadow and non-zero is shadowed.

Edit:Oops again, the shadow map isn't necessarily saved. The tile cache is purged without saving, so unless you have a large number of tiles (>32), chances are some tiles will be missing.

Edit #2: Nope, I was wrong. All the shadow map tiles are saved; you just have to be patient and wait for the light-mapping to finish. In any case, I'll still add a 'save shadow maps' option to the light-mapping wizard so you can do this for non-mosaic shadow maps too.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[dEaThMaStEr]

Heh, cool! I can't wait to get back and see all the new features you'll have put in during my abcense!

[jack.dingler]

Rather than doing real time renderings, perhaps a few sets of textures can be rendered ahead of time, and swapped in and out for time of day?