Plan for David "FenrirWolf" Grace

My Real-Time Rendering book came in this weekend. Woo! I plan on delving into that and brushing up on my linear algebra. Should be fun. Man, I should have gotten into 3d years ago instead of going, "Ahh, it's too hard!" and brushing it off. I've messed with my rasterizers and such, but that was all in software. The thought of doing a realtime per-pixel Z-order depth buffering was insane. Now, even the cheapest modern 3d card can do that...in hardware, without breaking a sweat.

Well, I promised screenshots in my last update, so here goes. Here's the base model, with standard DX9 off-the-shelf lighting:


Pretty basic. Well, after figuring out how to work with HLSL (aka Cg) I added environment mapping (spherical):


Ah, a bit too much. :) After getting the basics down, I added a specular component and then scaled the env map to more sane values, ending up with something pretty close to what I imagined:


What's nice is that I simplified my lighting scheme by removing one light and just using diffuse glow to simulate secondary reflections. I plan on adding some sort of bump mapping in the near future, to add a bit more surface detail. Of course, I can turn off the pixel shader at any time, so my code will support older graphics cards. Each model can have a seperate pixel shader attached to it based upon material, so I can mix effects on a single model.

BTW, that ship in the screenshots is my old one I used for the website. (But tesselated so it's only around 1500 polys.) I have a slightly different design in mind for the final version.

(EDIT: Duh, this isn't vBulletin. I fixed my image tags.)