Blog for Koushik at GarageGames.com

Shaders galore!

Koushik — 2008-09-21T04:54:29+00:00

I've been really occupied for the past many weeks, so a lot of things were put on the backburner for a bit. I've finally gotten around to finishing most of the shader-work that I had talked about. As I had promised, the multi-pass shaders are now complete, and whats more - they're compatible with the MK now!! Hurray!

I've tried to incorporate the entire shader source into the original MK's framework. I've removed most of my custom code in the process. As always, pictures speak louder than a thousand words, dont they?

First, some shots of the fur-shader again. I didn't have any models to really show them off, so poor old Kork was the scapegoat yet again.

Furry video

I am (finally!) using a GeForce 8600 with 13 render passes, and I got 45-50 fps. The results with fewer passes don't look all that bad, in fact 3 render passes work pretty well too, by just tweaking the shader parameters.

Second (there has to be a second, if there is a first, right?) there's another shader that I'd like to present. This one might find a lot more use - the sub-surface-scattering-approximation-texture-mapped-toner! Or for short - skin shader! Enough said, here are the screenies:

This actually works out of the box - no major material script changes and is single pass too!

Apart from this, the MK material system has been tweaked to now support uniforms and parameter passing via scripts! That means, you can have two different materials with the same shader, doing two different things. This was actually a precursor to my toon-shader. You can now pass-in the color of your object via the material script and have the shader perform NPR automatically, with just one shader!

The green-head and the pink-ish kork are rendered using the same shader, but by specifying different color parameters in their respective material script definitions.

And finally, to top it all off - expect ALL of these in the next couple of days - as GG resources!!

Cheers and good luck with all your projects folks!

Major announcements!

Koushik — 2008-08-05T14:34:41+00:00

Its been a bit hectic lately. I've been meaning to put up this post for a while and I can assure you that I've been delayed by atleast a week. (some people might argue that its much more than that).

Anyway, this Blog was meant to put forth a couple of really big announcements, as the title suggests. So, here goes.

Announcement #1

First, an update on one of my projects. FLAT Tryals :Unleashed, which I introduced a little earlier, has made it to the finals of the Intel Game Demo Contest 2008! That means that the demo that I was originally planning to release last week will now be delayed by a bit. It will undergo more feature-addition and polish. If you haven't checked out the game yet,
I suggest you go to the temporary website

The site is being updated, but is mainly a repository of gameinfo right now. The final website will hopefully be done in 2 weeks' time.

FT:U has been through a hectic development process and once its done, I'll probably put up the entire process as videos or on TDN. There's definitely a lot of stuff that I'd like to give out to the community after its done. Going from the original FLAT Tryals game, (which was not written with torque) to the next version was a very interesting challenge, and I hope to share the story with everyone. For starters, it was more than just a game-port. I stripped the original game down and started from scratch, though trying to keep the same basic philosophy in mind.

A couple of screens from a very early build, just to give you a hint of whats in store: (you might have seen some of 'em before)

This one is a very, very early version of a car shader I was working on. I can't quite show you what the shader looks like now (that would ruin the entire surprise now, wouldn't it?).

Now a few screens from in-game.

The above shots use a color-tone shader, and a fullscreen post-process bloom.

And of course, like the saying goes, a racing game without motion blur is like a racing game without racing (yeah, I know, I just made that one up) Here's a video showing motion-blur in game (I figured that getting a screen shot of it wouldn't really convey the idea)

Motion Blur video

Nothing fancy here. The effect is achieved using the accumulation buffer (its basically a buffer you can use to store stuff). I based my work on another resource. I was initially hoping to have a post-process blur with GLSL, but unfortunately my GPU couldn't handle it, and as one of the main requirements of a racing game is a very-good framerate, I decided to keep it off a bit, until I get a new GPU.

I would presume that the next announcement is of consequence to a lot of people.

Announcement #2

I have been working with shaders and TGE for a bit now. I initially sought to apply my OpenGL experience to TGE and get some sort of shader functionality. Since then I've got some stuff going, before I came across the Modernization Kit. To be very honest, the MK is a fantastic addition. It does a lot of neat stuff and it does it pretty well. I had been in touch with the original author of the MK, talking about improvements to the source. I've realised that the MK in itself has come to symbolize a lot of stuff. By managing it, I would remove some stuff from it, delete some functionality and replace it with my own, which I think goes against what it was originally intended for. So, I'm going to work on a fork-off of the MK - So, here's announcing the the Torque Render Package (TORPA)!

So how are the two announcements related, I hear you ask? Well, TORPA is basically a compilation of the framework behind FLAT Tryals: Unleashed!

The first version actually inherits a great deal from the modernization kit, especially its material system. Some key features:

- Slightly revamped material system, with a more powerful material script structure, including support for specific GLSL structures.
- Multi-pass shaders!
- Refraction/ Reflection effects on static and dynamic shapes
- Screen-space effects - post process effect manager
- DTS shaders
- Sample shader library with documentation on getting your own special effects
- Directly from FT:U - carpaint shader! Single and multipass for covering a larger range of hardware
- Non-photorealistic rendering!
- More stuff that I think would make for a good surprise!

I hope that is enough to look forward to. I've been meaning to release this stuff for a while but something seems to come up always. I guess the time is now come, hence the announcement.

Watch this space for more info very, very soon and good luck with your projects!

...And the sun shines again!!

Koushik — 2008-06-16T15:15:00+00:00

Ok, I'm rewriting this blog for the second time... and boy, is it loaded with news.

A small apology from my end. I had promised a lot of stuff to a lot of people and all of a sudden I was absconding. I've had a disastrous past month or so. First, I was plagued by the death of a very close family member. I was in depression for a while, and didn't feel like doing anything at all. Luckily, as a blessing in disguise, I broke my leg a week after that which got me bed-ridden for a couple of weeks. It was a time of deep thought and contemplation for me, and as they say, life must go on....

Getting back to where I've left off... The TGE normal-mapping code is up for grabs now. I'd really like to thank Ari and Jon of BrokeAss Games for testing it out first. You can find the resource here. Let me know if you have any problems.

Now, back to more shiny stuff (that's why you're still reading right?)

I thought I'd take this opportunity to introduce the two projects Ive been working on.

Project: Top Secret

Project: Top Secret is a community-designed game. There's a developer contest on for dev teams to make the game based on the community design - its a little far-fetched, but I've been prodding along for a while now. Initially, there were 14 teams registered, now there are only 3 left, unless the others are hard at work in area 51, which is a little unlikely, even by my standards... ;)

For this project, I've been working on getting a distintive art-style, predominantly shader-driven. Ok, enough ranting, check these:

This one uses some effects from a new post-processing framework I've been working on. The lighting is a new technique that I've tweaked to get working, and is based on a spherical harmonic basis - a similar lighting equation is used in TF2 and a modified version is used in HL2, I believe.

Flat Tryals : Unleashed

This is my game - my dream game of sorts. Its intended to be a remake of FLAT Tryals, which was the first "complete" 3D game demo I ever wrote, hence it has a sentimental significance. In fact, FLAT Tryals won me a copy of TGE at a gamedev contest less-than-a-year ago, and thats why I'm part of the TGE community, and THAT is also why you're reading this! :P

I wanted to take the original game to the next level - you know make it real fancy looking... The game is a total spoof of everything, including itself... ;) and is meant to be one hilarious experience! Let's hope it works out as expected...

Shiny?
Anyway, there's no real shiny"ness" this time, except for the next two pictures. Like I mentioned, I've gotten a new post-processing framework in place, and here's a sneak peak of a WIP depth-of-field effect... Enjoy!

Now, back to my scientific visualization routines - get that xray-imaging-simulator-volume-renderer wrangled out!

TGE fur-rendering!

Koushik — 2008-04-26T14:08:17+00:00

Hullo Folks!

After a hectic past week and a possibly more-occupied coming week, I decided to take some time off from the "usual stuff" and do something different. I had laid some foundations for implementing a GLSL fur-shader as part of my framework for TGE.

First, I think it would be wise for me to explain some fundamentals before I show-off some stuff. The fur rendering technique I've used is different from other common shader effects like per-pixel lighting and normal-mapping. It uses multiple rendering passes. For DTS objects, TGE does not support multi-pass rendering out of the box, I had to add that functionality myself.

The technique is a modification of the popular "shells and fins technique for realtime fur-rendering" which was a white-paper released by some Folks from Microsoft and UCal, Berkeley (I think). It was a pretty novel method and the best part is that it would work on a shader model 2.0 card! (Thats the best one I've got). As I have ranted on elsewhere, I use a GeForce2 MX card for most of my stuff (I know, I know... its from the stone ages). I have access to a GeForce 6150 on a friend's comp, which I use to my tests with shaders.

Anyway, that said, I have some screens - sorry that the size is only 800 x 600, my card couldn't render 6 passes on a higher resolution at a frame rate greater than 5 FPS. For the same reason, I couldn't really make a video, but if you take my word for it, it looks fantastic :P

The model is from a game I'm writing for a gamedev contest, the shots are from the show tool included with the SDK.

Hope you guys like it!!

TGE normalmapping take 2 (image heavy)

Koushik — 2008-04-08T02:07:57+00:00

Well, I finally got around to get a few things going in life.... after a very hectic past week in university...

Apart from a history presentation, and another pending presentation on convection and two phase flows (yeah, I take great pleasure in doing random-unrelated-things... I have a course in nanotechnology waiting as well), I have had little time to devote to TGE normal-mapping over the past week. After next week, that should change I hope...

Anyway, for those of you who have been following my posts so far, I posted about normal-mapping in my last post. I have come a fair distance since then. This new shader supports multiple-lights per scene and a multi-light type attenuation. So, now point lights work like point lights and spot lights work like spot lights, and it helps the realism a great deal.

I thought I'd do a quick breakdown to show you guys how the normal-mapping shader works. The various passes are described below. Please note that all these passes are done in the same fragment shader, not in a multi-pass rendering algorithm.

On a side note, in the following images, please ignore the grainy looks on the interiors, it was a fall-off from a previous test. Let the shininess begin!!

1. Normal vertex-lighting

2. Normal-map based lighting

3. Occlusion-map corrected ambient lighting

4. Final texture pass

Mandatory video (as always)

The occlusion map was generated from the texture. It is actually meant for static meshes, but as seen here, it does a pretty good job. The problem with the default torque orc model is that the normal-mapping effects are not so profound when seen with the base texture turned on. I am currently running some tests on another model and will get around to posting more results soon ( I hope)

Meanwhile, wish me luck on analyzing pipe-flows with varying Nusselt numbers and undetermined skin-friction coefficients!!

TGE Bump mapping - first screens!

Koushik — 2008-03-25T01:24:40+00:00

As I had mentioned in my earlier post, I have been working with getting shaders onto DTS objects... once that was done, it was absolutely essential to get bump-mapping working, for that is one of the main reasons I started working on this.

Anyway, I have some images and a video to show-off in tis edition of "in-your-face shininess"... take it away folks!

Mandatory pics!

Even-more-mandatory video

Like they say, a movie speaks louder than a thousand pictures! (er... they actually say that, right?) You really should see this one, it shows off the light-effects better.

Bump mapping video

Please remember that this is still WIP. Most people think that getting bump-maps from the MK is straight forward, because the MK does come with a parallax-mapping shader. However, the way TGE 1.5 handles lighting on DTS objects is different from how it handles DIFs. You'll need to call the openGL lights in the shader, as the dynamic lights are stored in there. This was what I did to get per-pixel lighting to work, as outlined in my previous entry.

For the record, the normal maps for Kork (good 'ole loyal Korkie) and the crossbow were generated using a nifty little program called CrazyBump. I've generated some AO maps and some spec maps as well, but haven't used them yet. Definitely work for the future :)

Let me know what you think of it!

Shaders and Shiny pictures!!

Koushik — 2008-03-10T15:56:25+00:00

First, a very big Hello to the garageGames community - "HELLO!!"

This being my first official GG blog post, I thought I'd start with a bang! So lets get down to business...
(If it matters, for an introduction, you can visit my profile :P)

I'm a rather recent addition to the garagegames community. I've owned TGE 1.5 for like 6 months, and am already deeply in love with it. The only nag I've heard people constantly put forth(by people I mean those from outside the GG community, like on DevMaster, GD.net etc.) is that TGE lacks programmable pipeline functionality, and when given the option of the "costlier" TGEA, they claim it's largely untested/ buggy/ has no cross-platform support/ (your crib here).

So the best way to satisfy these people is - to implement shader technology for TGE!!

Using a slightly modified version of the (fantastic) modernization kit and a bit of my own code, here it is folks, my first DTS shader tests!!

First, a video showing the tests: Shader video

For those of you who are lazy to download it, here are the mandatory Shiny pictures!!

1. Cel/toon shading

2. Per-pixel lighting

I'm working on getting bump-mapping working next, so look out for more shiny-pictures soon!!

So yeah, there goes my first GG blog post... yay!