Back from a much needed break
by Alex Scarborough · 08/27/2006 (1:34 am) · 3 comments
As some of you know, I recently returned from a nice (and much needed) three week vacation. By recently, I mean a week ago. Since then I've been quite busy putting together demos of my work, doing more TGE work, and just in general working. In fact, this weekend I'm doing something completely new: not working with Torque at all. It's really about time I learned to pace myself and work somewhat more reasonable hours.
Of course, I'm a workaholic, so I had to find something else to do to fill in the void. I started dumping my OpenGL and shader knowledge into TDN in the hopes that someone will find it useful. The OpenGL FAQ has gotten a lot more attention from me than the shader one at this point, so it's a bit more fleshed out. Oh, and just how important is this TDN warning: "WARNING: This page is 34 kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller section" ?
Anyhow, in terms of my Torque work (people seem to like it...), I have been toying with putting together a TGE based sandbox to allow people to mess around with OpenGL shaders. I wouldn't release the C++ source code (there are bits that I did as contract work, and bits that I'd rather keep private at this point), but all of the various shaders would be included. It amounts to about 500k in shaders at the moment, covering everything from basic fixed function emulation, to parallax mapping, to image manipulation and filtering. I'd obviously need to write real documentation for everything if I did this, but if there is enough interest in a GLSL sandbox, I'll put some effort into it. And if you read the OpenGL FAQ you might just find some handy information on implementing GLSL into Torque yourself.
Per usual, a .plan simply isn't a .plan without pictures. Below are some pictures of what I've been working on for the past week. What can I say? I got back, I was bored, and I had a copy of the OpenGL Orange Book.
Highly exaggerated example of hemisphere lighting:
Somewhat more reasonable example of hemisphere lighting:
What follows are all examples of per vertex spherical harmonic lighting (I like spherical harmonic lighting):
In this image, the interior uses the normal from its normal map to do the spherical harmonic lighting calculations on a per pixel basis:
Before anyone asks, I actually don't have any pictures from my vacation. I didn't bother to take a camera.
Of course, I'm a workaholic, so I had to find something else to do to fill in the void. I started dumping my OpenGL and shader knowledge into TDN in the hopes that someone will find it useful. The OpenGL FAQ has gotten a lot more attention from me than the shader one at this point, so it's a bit more fleshed out. Oh, and just how important is this TDN warning: "WARNING: This page is 34 kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller section" ?
Anyhow, in terms of my Torque work (people seem to like it...), I have been toying with putting together a TGE based sandbox to allow people to mess around with OpenGL shaders. I wouldn't release the C++ source code (there are bits that I did as contract work, and bits that I'd rather keep private at this point), but all of the various shaders would be included. It amounts to about 500k in shaders at the moment, covering everything from basic fixed function emulation, to parallax mapping, to image manipulation and filtering. I'd obviously need to write real documentation for everything if I did this, but if there is enough interest in a GLSL sandbox, I'll put some effort into it. And if you read the OpenGL FAQ you might just find some handy information on implementing GLSL into Torque yourself.
Per usual, a .plan simply isn't a .plan without pictures. Below are some pictures of what I've been working on for the past week. What can I say? I got back, I was bored, and I had a copy of the OpenGL Orange Book.
Highly exaggerated example of hemisphere lighting:
Somewhat more reasonable example of hemisphere lighting:
What follows are all examples of per vertex spherical harmonic lighting (I like spherical harmonic lighting):
In this image, the interior uses the normal from its normal map to do the spherical harmonic lighting calculations on a per pixel basis:
Before anyone asks, I actually don't have any pictures from my vacation. I didn't bother to take a camera.
About the author
Torque 3D Owner J.C. Smith