Torque 3D Question / rendering

#1 Yes, you can. The scene of the video is entirely mapped with the lightmaps. There you see the errors of the precalculated lightmaps, not coincide with objects that supposedly emit the respective light (fake light onject).

The T3D dynamic Cubemap can help u with the reflections.

#2 @Alfio, Thanks. I didn't spot the defects like you have. I am just a beginner. Thanks for your input.

#3 Does anyone have any refined projects or demo's anyone has made?

#4 I believe you could do that same scene better with Torque3D.
T3D actually has a very advanced renderer.

this scene has dynamic clouds and sun that are reflected realtime on the car paint as they move.
the scene took 2 minutes to set up.

#5 @deepscratch, thanks that was pretty cool.

#6 Yeah, it could be made to look better, but the cool thing about that Scifi Lab scene is that it is a one-texture environment! It's a UDK Showcase scene and uses a single 256x512 texture with some shader trickery that will take some serious manipulation of Torque's material system in order to duplicate the same aesthetic goal.

Quote:
To give an example, he said, "I used the blue channel of the normal map as a mask between metal and plastic or painted parts, which allowed me to separate the two with specular, color, etc. After a while, though, I realized that one color per prop plus metal was pretty limiting. My first idea was to make cuts in the mesh and have another material on the polygons that would take on a different color, but that would require an extra draw call, and I wanted to avoid that.

"Instead, I came up with the solution that in one of the UV sets, I moved the polygons that I wanted to change color on one UV-grid to the side, and then used a small area of one of the color channels as a mask that I scaled up in the material editor.

"This is only one example of how I had to think differently to fit everything in the texture and shader. Finding ways to create variety with the data you already have, such as UV-coordinates and texture channels, is a good challenge. Instead of looking at the textures strictly as diffuse, normal, etc., I tried to think of what I needed for the scene to look good, and how I could achieve that with minimal data, e.g., ditching the mask for the decals and solving it in the shader instead."

#7 @Michael,
That is seriously messed up. Now for practical purposes is this something that could be used to speed up T3D? Or is this more of a proof of concept to showcase what "could be done".

I would definitely like to play with a concept like this. Less textures = less memory = lower end cards?

#8 @Frank: it was more of POC from what I read. The artist even said that he wouldn't want to construct a full game using that exact technique, but was a great lesson learned in optimization.

I think a lot of people get carried away with overly detailed textures in places that don't truly need it. If you can free up megabytes of texture space and still achieve a similar appearance I'm all for it! And it does leave room for larger textures somewhere else. I wouldn't say that smaller textures necessarily lead to being able to target lower end hardware, but smaller memory footprint and fewer drawcalls can run better in general. The trick is to find a balance between optimization for increased performance when and where it's needed versus over-optimization techniques that can cut into your dev time.

#9 I use a similar technique for my eyes shader. I have a bitmap with a mask for each color channel.

#10 I have a lot of to learn. I still don't understand everything is talking about. I do think there are a lot of good things you can do with Torque. It's come a long way since TGE