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Reflectivity layer?

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Reflectivity layer?

Postby Forboding Angel » Wed Apr 22, 2009 12:22 am

Could a reflective map be added to l3dt? Possibly base it on the light or normals map?

One of the reasons why bryce and WICed maps look super nice is the fact that the map itself has reflectivity on the textures which makes for a really nice final touch.

Reflectivity might be the wrong term but hopefully you understand what I'm getting at.
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Postby Aaron » Mon May 04, 2009 11:08 am

Hi Forboding Angel,

I apologise for my slow reply. I'll look into texture and lighting upgrades for the following release, including handling reflectivity. Thanks for the request.

Cheerio,
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Postby Aaron » Thu May 14, 2009 12:46 pm

Hi Forboding Angel,

Something like this?

(left is current release, right is experimental specular lighting)
Image

Still some tweaking and tidying to do. I may have to implement HDR lighting to make it all behave nicely.

Cheerio,
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Postby David Walters » Sun May 17, 2009 4:03 pm

Any chance of a video at this stage, or are you almost done anyway? Seems like a good application of your new recording feature :)
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Postby Philippe Le Miere » Mon May 18, 2009 1:06 am

The new lighting is looking fantastic Aaron!

Can't wait to try it in the future release. 8)
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Postby Aaron » Wed Jun 10, 2009 1:32 pm

Hi Chums,

I've included this in the latest developmental build, but I think it may be disabled by default due to the need for some more tweaking. If you'd like to play with the specular highlights, you can enable the feature by enabling the the 'specular lighting' checkbox in the light mapping wizard (LM pane #2). The colour of the specular highlights is controlled by the 'specular' button on the light mapping wizard (LM pane #1). The specularity of each terrain type may be set in the material editor using the 'specular strength' edit box.

Please note that the specular lighting highlights here are not the same pretty specular lighting eye-candy that you may have seen in 3D engines, insofar as the highlights will not vary/move as the camera moves around on the terrain. If that is is the effect you desire, you will still need to implement it in your 3D engine, just as you always have.

Anyway, some more screenshots to explain what's going on:

This is a base texture map, with no lighting:

Image

...and this is the regular light map:

Image

The normal method to light the texture map is to modulate the unlit texture with the light map. The result is something like this:

Image

Now, the new build of L3DT also calculates a 'specular light map', as shown below. This is calculated along with the light map, includes no diffuse lighting, and is calculated with a high exponent on the sun/normal dot product to simulate shininess.

Image

If we add (not modulate) the specular light map to the texture after applying the regular lighting, we allow the light colour to overwhelm the texture colour on highlights, producing this more striking result:

Image

For comparison, here is the texture again without specular lighting:

Image

I hope we can agree that the specularly lit texture looks a little more interesting.

Anyway, once I finish tweaking the algorithm I promise to write a proper little tutorial on what the specular settings mean and how to use them. If you have any questions, please post them here.

Cheerio,
Aaron.
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