Preview of the new renderengine

[cajomi]

There is still a lot to do, but ........

I hope the next build is done before end of this week


Johannes Rosenberg

[CarlS]

Nice image Johannes.
I'm looking forward to trying out the new render engine :cool:

--Carl

[lachsack]

looks beautiful!

[Criss]

Very nice! :)

[mauronen]

Wow!!!!
There is still a lot to do, but ........
This build produces already great shots.
I can't wait to put my hand on this beautiful tool

[monks]

Wow!- that's looking great.

monks

[Arklon]

Has radiosity been implemented, or will it be implemented? (There's faster ways of doing it than the brute force hemicube/patch method, by the way.)

[cajomi]

In Version 2 the renderengine will be much more powerful, but it is still mostly for judging a terrain and not for rendering gallery images. A 4096 terrain will render in a few seconds, and this needed speed will lower the quality.
GI or Radiosity are not planned for version 2.

[mauronen]

...
GI or Radiosity are not planned for version 2.
Sorry Johannes: what is GI?

[cajomi]

GI = Global Illumination
As good GI use the light of the sky. But not only the colour. It takes into account the different colours of the sky and the directions. A bit like HDRI lightning.

[Patrick210]

Do you plan on having a movable light source?

[Arklon]

A bit like HDRI lightning.
Not really. HDRI just makes bright areas brighter, dark areas darker, yet allows you to see every detail.

[cajomi]

@Patrick
The sun will be movable. But in the next build, begin of the week, this is not yet implemented.

@Arklon
I am speaking about HDRI lightning, not HDRI. You are right about the HDRI, but a HDRI lightning modell takes into account the different brightness and colours in the different areas of the sky. So, for example, a HDRI with a visible sun produces shadows, as if there is a light source in the scene.

[Arklon]

@Patrick
@Arklon
I am speaking about HDRI lightning, not HDRI. You are right about the HDRI, but a HDRI lightning modell takes into account the different brightness and colours in the different areas of the sky. So, for example, a HDRI with a visible sun produces shadows, as if there is a light source in the scene.
You mean like spherical harmonics and wavelet lighting?

[cajomi]

Well, what software works with spherical harmonics or wavelet lightning?
I have never heard from.

[Arklon]

Well, what software works with spherical harmonics or wavelet lightning?
I have never heard from.
They're a couple GI lighting techniques sometimes (well, actually, hardly ever) used in 3D engines. Probably why they're not really used often is because they can only use light from infinitely far away light sources (like skyboxes), spherical harmonics drastically blurs the lighting, and wavelet lighting (which is a moddifie version of spherical harmonics that uses wavelet transform rather than Fourier transform, and results in MUCH higher lighting quality) is a performance eater and has high storage requirements. However, the advantage they have over lightmapping is that, in the case of wavelet lighting, shadows and other lighting features can be sharper and, more importantly (for both spherical harmonics and wavelet lighting), you can have moving objects and dynamic lights (but they, again, have to be infinitely far away). You still can't have deformable geometry, though; the techniques require precomputation (which can take hours).

[cajomi]

Well, you still did not answer my question: Which software uses this.

I always need fast algorithm. And those latest developements are mostly not for the practice at the moment, but for furture implementations. Sounds to me more like the newest developement, more science than practice.

[Arklon]

Well, you still did not answer my question: Which software uses this.3D game engines. Again, it's rarely implemented. The only commercial engine I've seen that uses spherical harmonics is the Reality Engine, which was bought by Epic Games and merged with Unreal Engine 3. I don't know if spherical harmonics was kept in UE3.

[cajomi]

No wonder, I did not hear from. I am more orientated to applications, and there GI and HDRI are more common.
Although, GeoControl is for game developement, it does not use the technics for games but for applications.

[Arklon]

No wonder, I did not hear from. I am more orientated to applications, and there GI and HDRI are more common.
Although, GeoControl is for game developement, it does not use the technics for games but for applications.But my question was, is HDRI lighting similar to those techniques (using an infinitely far away image (skybox-type deal) for lighting)?

[cajomi]

Infinity to a skydome makes no sense. The skydome for HDRI is defined by angles, not by distance. The technic uses the whole skydome as light.

[Arklon]

Infinity to a skydome makes no sense. The skydome for HDRI is defined by angles, not by distance. The technic uses the whole skydome as light.
In any case, the ambient lighting in GC2's 3D preview needs to be more than a constant lighting term so you can see details in areas in shadow (just making it darker the lower it faces will suffice).

[cajomi]

Oh, it is not a constant lightning. It is angle dependend, means the more a face points to the zenit, the more light it gets.
If you are used with 3D rendering softwares, which can render terrains, you will find, that the shadow details are always a problem. You get nearly no shadow relief. But this is the same in nature. If you study some photos you will find, that the shadows have nearly no relief, but are structured by the "texture", gras, rocks, differences in the brightness of different materials.

In a further build there will be slider, to enhance the shadow contrast. Not so realistc, but better to see the terrain details.