Lens Flares
January 11th, 2009
I just started working on lens flares; I need to see the sun's location so I can test shadows! I am testing a new technique for dynamic lens flares based on the anatomy of the human eye, inspired by a paper by Tobias Ritschel. The basic idea is to simulate the glare as a human eye would see it ...
Pen and paper: next-gen design tools
January 5th, 2009
When designing algorithms for 3D rendering, it's often tricky for me to visualize what I'm doing. I find that if I stop for a few seconds and sketch the idea out using pen and paper, it helps understand how it all fits together. There are all sorts of computer programs that let you make charts and outlines really ...
Concept Art to Finished Asset
December 25th, 2008
Anyone who follows this blog will have seen a few of our highly polished concepts for characters in Overgrowth. I went all-out on these, detailing the grass or fur and backgrounds. Making them in full color. While I really enjoyed creating them, they are only a small part of the concept work that gets done. The main purpose of concept ...
Off the Grid Terrain
December 20th, 2008
Hey guys, here is the first part of the long ago promised post on our terrain simplification. Like most other 3D games, we're generating terrain meshes from heightmaps. The easiest way to do this is to just sample from the heightmap at regular intervals and place corresponding vertices on a regular grid. Unfortunately, this can lead to chunky looking ...
Ambient occlusion
November 25th, 2008
Direct light and shadows from the sun are only half of the lighting system in Overgrowth. The other half is indirect light from the rest of the sky. To make the indirect light look realistic, we also have to calculate indirect light shadows! I thought this looked cool, so here is a screenshot of the indirect shadows on the desert ...
High-detail terrain shadows
November 24th, 2008
The shadow rendering is now much more optimized, and has no limit on resolution! Here is a screenshot of the same terrain as before at a higher detail level. Since all of the lighting is pre-computed in the texture, the increase in quality has no affect on the framerate!
Terrain Shadows
November 21st, 2008
I just got terrain self-shadowing working! I also started optimizing rendering by automatically baking all of the sky and sun lighting into a single texture, so the real-time shader can be drastically simplified. The texture in this screenshot is low-resolution just to test out the technique, I will have some high-res shots soon.