Thursday, March 19, 2009

Materials and lighting

Hello everyone!
I know, I don't post frequently, but believe me, it doesn`t mean I'm not working. In fact, soon I'll start posting media content of version 0.4, wich I promess will be much more visual than earlier versions. That is today's topic, Visual improvements: new material system and lighting.
Let's start with lighting:
Revolution engine 0.4 wil be the first version featuring lighting. I can only say three things about lighting so far:
-First: won't be limited to the eight lights supported by wii hardware
-Second: Will be customizable (colors, types, etc...)
-Third: Will be per vertex, using a variation of phong equation, modified to proper integration with tev, and featuring amient, diffuse, and specular lighting.

Now Materials: Materials are probably what I'm working harder on. Until now, materials system in the engine has been SO simple. You could just set a diffuse color or a diffuse map, just a simple texture for your objects. This is changing.
Beside some basic effects such as tiling and so, Materials now feature many different types of shaders. I'm only going to explain what the basic one consists of:
-Diffuse color or map: This is obvious.
-Gloss map or gloss coefficient: because different objects shine different.
-Specular color: no specular maps yet, that will come in later versions, but this will work (I'll post renders soon)
-Specularity coefficient.

Of course transparency and all those effects are still avaiable and some are improved.

This is a work in progress screen about lighting



I really think you all will enjoy this update.

Bye!