Rendering Plants with Smooth Edges
February 11th, 2009
When we are rendering many objects on screen at the same time, we only have a few hundred polygons to allocate to each individual plant. We use intersecting alpha-mapped planes to give the impression of much greater detail. Here is a picture of what our desert tree looks like with the alpha channel used for color instead of transparency: If ...
Overgrowth alpha 13
February 9th, 2009
Another week, another alpha! Here is what is new in Overgrowth this week. As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked some stuff, and implemented some new features. Aubrey has created even more art. Going through our svn code logs the past week, here are a few highlights: - A few optimizations - New transparency stuff - Fixed widescreen FOV - Hooked ...
Trees
February 8th, 2009
I finished up some trees and a few smaller bushes recently. Some of this stuff is still a work in progress, but I was happy enough with how the tree came out to show it off a bit. Here is our new tree in action! This is still using our standard material shader. Soon we will have a special leaf ...
Staying Current with Graphics Research
February 8th, 2009
One of our favorite things to do is to find cool graphics research videos and to share them with each other on AIM. We're trying to stay current with the latest graphics techniques in hopes that we may find useful technologies for Overgrowth and for our future games. Here are five of the coolest research videos we have been ...
Wolfire Graphic Converter Utility
February 7th, 2009
One cool feature in Overgrowth is that it automatically and intelligently converts your image files when you run it. For example, Aubrey can be designing a level and working on textures in the raw TGA format. Aubrey likes TGA because it has a separate channel for alpha transparency so in Photoshop you can draw directly onto its transparency mask seamlessly ...
The ruins of Lugaru
February 5th, 2009
People who played Lugaru will be familiar with the ruins in that game-- often simple blocks of stone-like material, they played a critical gameplay role in many of the levels. Going into Overgrowth, I thought this was one of the more original aspects of the art direction. They seemed very mysterious and abstract, and that was my favorite thing about ...
New Alpha Video
February 5th, 2009
David made this video a little while ago to help spice up our ModDB profile (be sure to join it if you haven't already!) I thought I would post it to the blog as well. Be sure to click here to watch it in HD! Be sure to subscribe to the Wolfire YouTube channel if you haven't already ...