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render fur

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I watched the BBC series "walking with dinos" the other night, and I noticed that the fluffy/wooly effect of their fur was fantastic! so technically it can be done (off course, but at what costs!)

Do you guys think the DOOM3 engine will be capable to render fur / hairy skins? I have never seen a game where this even came close to a realisctic fur effect.

I think fur would contribute to a scary admosphere

Is this possible? enlighten me!

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It is in concept possible to do this in real time, though at lower quality, of course. If you have a GeForce3 card, then you can use vertex and pixel shader programs to do this all in video hardware! Visit the nVidia site for some some screenshots of some demos.

The problem is it might not work in an actual game framework. Some effects, no matter how good, just don't translate well when actually put into a free, open game world. For instance, there isn't very much sub-sampling on graphics cards, which would mean that individual hairs might "pop" up or something, depending on the size of the hair in view compared with the pixel area it's rendered to. Or something like that.

Anyway, it would look pretty cool to have fur in Doom3...

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Fur is a possibility. Hair's still out of our league, since it also requires a robust physics calculation because of its flexibility.

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For instance, there isn't very much sub-sampling on graphics cards, which would mean that individual hairs might "pop" up or something, depending on the size of the hair in view compared with the pixel area it's rendered to.

In fact, fur or hair will look horrendous without more samples, it would be like the classical "dancing pixels" effect so common in Software engines where the textures have no mipmaps and rendered using linear filtering.

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Zaldron: Obviously, you don't HAVE a VS/PS-capable card. Hair can be done quite easily and very realistically by even the lowly Geforce 3 Ti200. Fur should be no problem.

EsH: You ARE of course, aware that the Geforce 3 is not the only video card out there which can process vertex/pixel-shader programs, right?

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Zaldron: Obviously, you don't HAVE a VS/PS-capable card. Hair can be done quite easily and very realistically by even the lowly Geforce 3 Ti200. Fur should be no problem.


If that is the case I hope they implement fur in DOOM3. I think that killing something furry (e.g. bunny) or being attacked by something furry (e.g. wolf) would contribute to the emotional binding to the game.

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I'm not sure if the Imp has fur.

Well anyway it's not like DooM really needs these things. I'm expecting them first in some X-Box fighting game.

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EsH: You ARE of course, aware that the Geforce 3 is not the only video card out there which can process vertex/pixel-shader programs, right?


Yes, of course, I'm sorry. ATI has some wonderful cards out, especially the 8500 (I think it's called?). I've just been drooling after getting a GeForceMX, so for me, "video card" means "nVidia".

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You don't need pixel & vertex shaders to do decent looking fur, just opacity mapped textures.
Check out the link, it has some pics of a game for gamecube which uses this method.


http://www.thegia.com/gc/sfa/sfamedia4.html

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That needs way too many polys. With next-gen cards it doesn't really matter, but if we're talking about a possible feature for DOOM, I'll say they're pretty much killing the vid card with the hi-poly models...

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Uh, I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but the GCN can process pixel/vertex shader programs too. It uses a derivative of the same tech that's in the Radeon 8500, or so I'm told.

But you're right, you don't NEED PS/VS to do good fur; PowerVR recently released a bunch of demos that show that a Kyro II can do anything a Geforce 3 can if it's programmed right. Interesting stuff.

But Starfox Adventures DOES use the Microsoft-approved method of generating fur; it's the same one several Xbox games already use for grass and hair and fur.

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Well I didn't say that gamecube couldn't do pixel/vertex shaders, cuz I'm not sure. I thought that it couldn't, and I'm 100% positive that Flipper and Raedon are completely different tech made by different companies. The design for Flipper was nailed down by ArtX before they merged with ATI.

What method does Starfox Adventures use for fur? Looks like plain opacity maps to me, and I thought those X-Box games used pixel/vertex shaders for grass and shit.


And furry imps?? Hell no! That would make them look too cuddly I think.

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I was told (quite recently, though I have relatively little faith in the source) that the R200 contains tech from the Flipper chip. If I'm wrong, sue me. ^.^ But yes, I'm aware that ATI didn't make the Flipper chip by themselves.

As far as PS/VS support for the cube; well, it doesn't use DirectX, that's for sure. But it does support use of PS/VS, just...they have to be implemented differently. I don't really know how it works, one of the guys I hang out with online all the time is a GCN developer.

Check it.

ACM Real-Time fur over arbitrary surfaces using pixel shaders

Developed by Microsoft.

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