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Plan for James "Defiant" Lupiani
Plan for James "Defiant" Lupiani
| Name: | James Lupiani |  |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Oct 27, 2002 | |
| Rating: |  Not Rated | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
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| Profile Page: | View profile page for James Lupiani |
Blog post
Messing around with multi-textured materials.
I've been playing on and off with a multipass/multitexture material system for Torque. I'm testing it using Melv May's fxRenderObject framework, and once I'm satisfied with it I intend to expand it for use in interiors and shapes.
I had a sudden inspiration while playing with the in-game tools one day that it'd be possible to use datablocks to define texture stages. So my class is actually a datablock, and optimized for network transmission. This could allow a server to specify special materials (team colors or logos perhaps?) and clients will receive them upon connection. Well, it was just a hunch. The nice thing is it fits right into the conventions that Torque uses already, and you can mess with them on the fly while the game's running. Plus, you can group a bunch of datablocks together in a script file and use them as a library or theme.
It's been a good exercise in learning the nitty gritty of multitexturing, which I've never had a chance to play with before. First I planned out what I wanted to do--which basically boiled down to something like Q3A shaders. After talking with some community members, I decided to leave out animation features, at least for my first attempt. The idea is to supplement the existing rendering without getting totally replaced whenever someone comes up with vertex and fragment shader stuff for Torque.
It actually has two implementations. First I got it working with multipass and limited blending modes, then earlier this week I got multitexturing working...at least, partially. Something's weird with it, and it won't blend more than two stages (I have a Radeon, 3 TUs). But enough tell, here's the show:
Here I've blended a little glow texture with a larger background texture using simple blend functions.
And here I've used that same larger texture as a detail map on the grass texture that comes with torque.
The way it's defined is a little messy, it's very much programmatic. I hope to come up with a more elegant solution for doing it at some point. Here's the datablock used for that second screenshot:
So yeah, a little messy. But it's a lot of fun to mess with so far. ;-)
I had a sudden inspiration while playing with the in-game tools one day that it'd be possible to use datablocks to define texture stages. So my class is actually a datablock, and optimized for network transmission. This could allow a server to specify special materials (team colors or logos perhaps?) and clients will receive them upon connection. Well, it was just a hunch. The nice thing is it fits right into the conventions that Torque uses already, and you can mess with them on the fly while the game's running. Plus, you can group a bunch of datablocks together in a script file and use them as a library or theme.
It's been a good exercise in learning the nitty gritty of multitexturing, which I've never had a chance to play with before. First I planned out what I wanted to do--which basically boiled down to something like Q3A shaders. After talking with some community members, I decided to leave out animation features, at least for my first attempt. The idea is to supplement the existing rendering without getting totally replaced whenever someone comes up with vertex and fragment shader stuff for Torque.
It actually has two implementations. First I got it working with multipass and limited blending modes, then earlier this week I got multitexturing working...at least, partially. Something's weird with it, and it won't blend more than two stages (I have a Radeon, 3 TUs). But enough tell, here's the show:
Here I've blended a little glow texture with a larger background texture using simple blend functions.
And here I've used that same larger texture as a detail map on the grass texture that comes with torque.
The way it's defined is a little messy, it's very much programmatic. I hope to come up with a more elegant solution for doing it at some point. Here's the datablock used for that second screenshot:
// Example Staged Material
datablock MaterialData( MyTestMaterial )
{
// STAGE 0 ------------------------
// Main texture
texture[0] = "~/data/terrains/grassland/grass";
// STAGE 1 ------------------------
// Detail map
texture[1] = "~/data/terrains/metal/metal2";
texMode[1] = combine;
colorMode[1] = modulate;
colorArgA[1] = previous;
colorOpA[1] = src_color;
colorArgB[1] = texture;
colorOpB[1] = src_color;
colorScale[1] = 2.0;
alphaMode[1] = replace;
alphaArgA[1] = previous;
alphaOpA[1] = src_alpha;
};
So yeah, a little messy. But it's a lot of fun to mess with so far. ;-)
Recent Blog Posts
| List: | 10/16/06 - Community Weekend & Frozen Codebase 11/07/05 - Plan for James Lupiani 09/21/05 - Plan for James Lupiani 08/11/05 - Plan for James Lupiani 11/28/04 - Plan for James Lupiani 02/26/03 - Plan for James Lupiani 10/27/02 - Plan for James "Defiant" Lupiani 05/25/02 - Plan for James "Defiant" Lupiani |
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Submit your own resources!| Ben Garney (Oct 27, 2002 at 06:17 GMT) |
Incidentally, I noticed that your GUI stuff has a neat rounded blue theme... I want to redo the default theme stuff but am not really sure where to start. Did you do that yourself? Any wisdom for a programmer who wants to put his meagre art skills to work?
| Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr (Oct 27, 2002 at 07:13 GMT) |
| Grant "GrantNZ" Garmonsway (Oct 27, 2002 at 07:49 GMT) |
| Stefan Beffy Moises (Oct 27, 2002 at 09:27 GMT) |
Keep it up!
- beffy
| Xavier "eXoDuS" Amado (Oct 27, 2002 at 13:03 GMT) |
Expecting to play with it soon :)
| James Lupiani (Oct 27, 2002 at 23:42 GMT) |
Ben: Actually, that was kind of an in-between stage for my GUI. I've redone the title bar and buttons now, too. I'm trying to get a darker look to it overall. Unfortunately I'm having trouble getting some of the GUI components to listen to their profiles. I fear I'll have to dig in deep or rewrite all the profiles before I figure out what's wrong. My philosophy for my skin: keep it simple and do it a pixel at a time so it's not sloppy. And a tip that will save you time: always be consistent with the size of your bitmap arrays. Otherwise it'll probably blow up on you.
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