Offtopic: Bumpmaping

The link to the photoshop plugin:

http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=ps_normalmapfilter

It takes in a grayscale bumpmap, and spits out a normal map. It would actually be better to load a bumpmap into your engine, and then generate the normal map off of it, because then you can store your bumpmap grayscale (256colors) and it would be a smaller file. With the normalmap already to go, it has to be in at least 16 bit to be acceptable. Converting a normal map to 8-bit makes it a little grainy, and it really shows when you load it up in a bumpmap renderer.

and thanks again :)

np :)

The_Tonx said:

who? me?

No,

Is GiXeLz the same guy (or 1 of the guys) from Ali entertainment from http://www.planetquake.com/ali/PROJECTS/PPL_Demo1.HTM

Because they claim to have developed the thing, or am I wrong?

By the way http://genrtcw.has.it/ creates a mod with bumpmapping for RTCW. sounds interesting

I didn't claim to have made that one. I made this one:

http://www.van-noland.com/gixelz/stencil.jpg
http://www.van-noland.com/gixelz/ppl_demo.zip

The bumpmapping used in that RTCW mod is called 'elevation mapping', it's slower than dot3 bumpmapping, but I suppose it's more realistic because the bumps actually stick out of the surface. You can read up on it if you like at:

http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/1334/ATT/ElevationMaps2.pdf

Basically, you draw the same polygon a bunch of times, each time moving it slightly in the direction it's facing. The bumpmap is used with a pixel shader to determine what pixels on the polygon should or should not be drawn. It's kinda like a CAT scan, how it's in slices. All those extra polygons just eat fillrate like mad. Speaking of eating, I'm going to go rummage around in the kitchen for a midnight snack ;)

GiXeLz said:

http://www.van-noland.com/gixelz/stencil.jpg

You're hitting 270fps ?? Jesus Christ, what card are you on ?

Zoost said:

By the way http://genrtcw.has.it/ creates a mod with bumpmapping for RTCW. sounds interesting

It really does. I'm looking forward to try the first public test :)

Lord FlatHead said:

You're hitting 270fps ?? Jesus Christ, what card are you on ?

I couldn't even OPEN the APP with my shitty i810e :D

That bumpmapping RTCW mod thing looks ass.

You're hitting 270fps ?? Jesus Christ, what card are you on ?

I'm only using a GF2mx400 and I'm averaging around about 40FPS, so it might be a GF4 at least...maybe a 3, but dunno.

oh yeah, it's pretty cool too. Good work dude.

Lord FlatHead said:

That bumpmapping RTCW mod thing looks ass.

Yeah, but it was very first time when I actually saw a video that demonstrated BUMPMAPPING. So I liked it :) I mean this bricked wall.. :) Nice :) Only too bad lighting :(

Lord FlatHead said:

You're hitting 270fps ?? Jesus Christ, what card are you on ?

Man i only come up to 170fps :(

Im running GeForce3. I was working on combining passes when I took that screenie, because I can combine them on gf3. The version I uploaded has all the passes separated, so it goes slower (I need someone with geForce1 to confirm it runs)..

Here are my passes:


1. depthfill
2. stencil shadows
3. light attenuation
4. mult w/diffuse bumpmapping
5. add specular
6. mult w/diffuse coloring

I do passes numbers 2-5 once for each light. In the demo there is only one light so I only do it once. I am doing it in immediate mode (passing vertices to video card each pass) but in my engine it will be done using vertex arrays, so bandwidth won't be consumed as much. I still have to pass cubemap coordinates to the card as they are generated realtime by the light source's position. But the vertex arrays will speed things up dramatically.

Then I need to determine if the hardware being used has enough texture units and register combiners to combine the lighting into to fewer passes.

I also have to figure out how to generate cubemap texcoords for projected lighting when the light is rotated. It would add another pass just after attenuation, which would be a mult. Hrm. well I better get back to work :)

GiXeLz's reply

whoa..

lol

Is your engine an open source project or it is a commercial project ?

If not im interested in testing and maybe using it later for a project im planing.

I am working on a project with some friends atm. Once our project is pretty complete, we are sending a demo off to some publishers to see if they'd be interested.

If they all hate it, it will become opensource.

What do YOU think? I mean.. the demo is (or at least seems to be(coz I can't run it ;( )) wonderful, but why should they buy you'r engine? I belive they have many engines to choose.. Do you belive they pick your's?

haha.. that's not what I meant.

I meant make my own GAME out of my engine. Give them that. Not the engine.

oh, I see

Hey, they turned a simple mod as crappy as Counter-Strike into a fully fledge store-shelved product. It can't be THAT hard to get a game onto store shelves. That is, if you have the game already.

CS wasn't crap IMO

It was a fun mod for a while, but the quality sucks. They are still releasing patches well after the betas! It wasn't a really complex project.

GiXeLz said:

Here are my passes:


1. depthfill
2. stencil shadows
3. light attenuation
4. mult w/diffuse bumpmapping
5. add specular
6. mult w/diffuse coloring

I do passes numbers 2-5 once for each light.

This is extremely interesting and impressive! Will you try to implement the new render-bump type pre-proccessing, or are just sticking with bump-mapping everything generaly?

GiXeLz said:

It was a fun mod for a while, but the quality sucks. They are still releasing patches well after the betas! It wasn't a really complex project.

Yea. But I like games that are fun :) After all, that's what it's all about, isn't it? [entertainment]

The_Tonx said:

Yea. But I like games that are fun :) After all, that's what it's all about, isn't it? [entertainment]

Well, like he said, it was fun for a while - after that it wasn't fun anymore. Get it?

dsm said:

Well, like he said, it was fun for a while - after that it wasn't fun anymore. Get it?

sure :) But that's so with most of games. You play them for a while and then just go back to good old ones (like DOOM ;) ).

But I gotta agree with this point that I can't understand how they could get this (CS MOD) to shop-shelves..

The_Tonx said:

sure :) But that's so with most of games. You play them for a while and then just go back to good old ones (like DOOM ;) ).

But I gotta agree with this point that I can't understand how they could get this (CS MOD) to shop-shelves..

Well, there are games that are fun at first, but then they get so boring that you don't want to return to them again and then there are games that remain fun for a while, then they get boring, you wait a few months and then they're kickass to play again (Doom).

Everything is generally going to be bump mapped. Except for 2D gfx, like text, console, etc..

I devised a GeForce3/4 pipeline where I use 3 register combiners for each pass, 2 passes per light. But I still have the depth pass and diffuse color pass to put on there.

On GeForce3/4 is 2+2n passes, where 'n' is the number of lights in the scene. This also varies with stuff like alpha-masking (textures with holes, like fences, grates, etc).

Cool. Though may I remind you this isn't a graphics tech forum, despite the people who think "Doom III" and "graphics tech" are exact synonyms.