Friday 21 November 2008

Flanges With Everything

Can't say I like the turquoise colour, but it'll do for the moment. Refraction and depth blending seem to work acceptably well, and the water is not too bad looking in motion. Still pondering the best way to integrate the dynamic lights.

I reworked the way texture types are distributed over the cavern, so it biases the moss (purple!) around the water with the 'shrooms. Said shrooms are currently not placed exactly on the ground, instead they use the average height for a tile and therefore tend to float a bit, which when you have shadows and the right lighting angle becomes painfully obvious.

It can't be seen in this pic, but there's also support for emissive maps now. The mushrooms have tiny glowing spots which will be re-worked into larger glowing spots for a future screenshot. Unfortunately the addition of the emissive data to the pipeline has gobbled up most of my last free render target... all further information will have to be crammed into the three spare alpha channels. I'm guessing either a specular channel and material indices or a handful of miscellaneous BRDF parameters will eat those.

My hope is to do some content generation this weekend, but I strongly suspect it'll disappear into less fruitful activities. Still, you never know!

By the way, anyone know of a good (preferably open source) alternative to the GIMP? Its support for working with images using the alpha channel in any non-trivial way is frankly terrible.

2 comments:

Jotaf said...

I like Paint.Net, it lets you draw with alpha and stuff, blending the brush's color with both the transparent background (setting the alpha) and also existing solid colors, and everything in-between. I think you can deal with the alpha channel separately too. It's free and it's got tons of optional plug-ins :)

Snut said...

Thanks, I'll check it out again - last I looked it didn't seem to have many features relating to the alpha channel, but that was ages ago *g*