underscore discovery

One thing i forgot to post (doh!) while working on the reflection setups in my engine for shadowracer was the reflectance tests i had done. I had typed an incorrect value and ended up with a super low res reflection – This and something Blindside had mentioned to me before about trying that as a trick got me into messing around with ambient color and reflectance under the diffuse layer, based on the realtime environment around the car itself.

i attempted to layer the lighting setup in such a way to have a diffuse map + ambient surrounding reflectance + the realtime reflection and it looked really nice – but within certain parameters was not giving what i expected due to the nature of the reflection im using. After a lot of messing around and tweaking i reimplemented the layer for ambient reflectance but pre diffuse texture in the pipeline. This means i ran the low pass reflection on the white/blank slate car instead of the diffuse texture. This gave me even better underlying results for the reflectance and i already had an ambient texture attached to the map (a baked AO map) in the 4th slot. Multiplying adding and trying different combinations gave some cool results, so i tried using the abient map as a falloff of reflectance and fresnel and who knows what else i added for the testing phase, but a lot of really interesting results came about. Below is only one of the stages i had reached and i realised i hadnt shown any of this progress so i figured what the hell. The amount of time its taken to finish this small post in between the rest of the fun things that im working on (work side) and the fact that i had an image set already screencapped means you get one bunch of pictures. Enjoy!

Reflectance of ambient scene lighting and surrounding objects

Some notes : the reflection and base shaders are based on my own work, but the original point i started at was BLindsides great DP realtime reflectance in irrliche engine.

All shots realtime, +- 300 fps, 16×16 RTT per pass (2 passes per object) on a ATI thats not immense

All images are overly exaggerated to demonstrate the effects here, a low level ambient reflectance works really well with any material, wood, metal, concrete etc etc. More sometime, i think!