Wow - 2d graphics with 3D lighting, depth info, etc

[quote="David":3syudvyz]
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939828/light3.exe

Had a go at making a shader which is a modification of the bump map shader (one that supports an alpha channel that represents the heightmap). Its hell tricky to use though. Basically you need to determine how high white is to be able to get the pixels. Oh and making 3dsmax or whatever your using rendering everything correctly is also a headache...

Anyway I understand the technique...its just getting the shader perfected.[/quote:3syudvyz]

Holy.. Damn! Works great too! I gotta find excuses to use this now

[quote="David":3syudvyz]Yep haha. Also just wrote a shader for ambient occlusion for lucid I'm on a roll. But its 6:30am and i better get some sleep. By the way if someone could find a tutorial for writing a really decent 'per pixel point light shader in HLSL' i'd be forever grateful coz mines an adaptation of the bumpmap and i'm worried its wrong

edit: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030 ... l_03.shtml

aha![/quote:3syudvyz]

Haha, I saw that in chat (just woke up, sorry I suddenly got so quiet earlier lol), guess lucid spotted madster and I's SSAO discussion on the forum, I posted that page he showed you when I was trying to prove it could be done and was being an ass and not giving up, hehe.

This is really great, better than most 3d "real time" engines. But I see one problem: characters and animated objects. It would be wonderfull to have this with detailed characters, imagine, like real life mini action figures moving . Isometric like games are really memory eaters. You need all your animations x all angles. 8 views or 16 for smooth rotation effect. But now you need to do x3. And this for all the objects in the scene. And if you want do do a high resolution game, or big objects... The only solution I can see here it is simple; real 3d for character, or perhaps some kind of 3d obj loader that transform it in a sprite with color, zdepth and normal in real time, to maintain the same level of quality as backgrounds.

[quote="David":2uru1m8u]
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939828/light3.exe[/quote:2uru1m8u]
This is quite awesome!
although the amount of setup for it to work scares me a bit... waiting for .cap and effect files!

[quote="Madster":xbv3pxi6][quote="David":xbv3pxi6]
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939828/light3.exe[/quote:xbv3pxi6]
This is quite awesome!
although the amount of setup for it to work scares me a bit... waiting for .cap and effect files![/quote:xbv3pxi6]

From what I can gather (and David will have to confirm if this is right or wrong for the shader, I'm mostly guessing) you do the following.

Create your scene, object or whatever you're wanting to use it on.


Make a gradient that goes from the bottom (black) to the top (white) of the model. Don't use the depth map or zbuffer or whatever it's called in your program of choice.


Make a normal version using tangent space (the original videos say world space, but the appearance is that of a tangent/texture space normal map). Max users say this is done via render to texture, Softimage and Maya probably has a buffer it can output in this format, Lightwave needs some extra plugins since it uses tangent but can only natively output world space, lol.


From there you need to place the height map in the normal map, so the highest area's are transparent (white) and the lowest area's 100% opaque (black).

Go back into construct, load your full rendered image, and the normal+height image, place that over the rendered one and apply the effect.

[quote="David":mdmgdu0s] By the way if someone could find a tutorial for writing a really decent 'per pixel point light shader in HLSL' i'd be forever grateful coz mines an adaptation of the bumpmap and i'm worried its wrong [/quote:mdmgdu0s]
Here Davo, Hope it works :p

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939828/Real%20Light.exe

1,2 - Increase decrease intensity of light
3,4 - Increase decrease range of light
Left Mouse Right Mouse - Increase decrease z of light.

Really great work David!! With Normal+Depth combo you can even get more effects like SSAO, SSGI, Reflections... in real time. For After Effects there are some plugins, that creates refractions and proyectes shadows too.

Wow davo!
Thats freakin amazing, its good to see that that IS possible in construct.

That's amazing.. No words at all. But nah, shadows are not possible.. Or anyway they can't be very nice! There's no perspective..

Yes, they are

ZBornToy: [url:2z5sqq69]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOWiuLl5aeY&feature=PlayList&p=3EC86876CE289BE6&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=3[/url:2z5sqq69]

Normality 3:
[url:2z5sqq69]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbSpyDoRzoY[/url:2z5sqq69]
[url:2z5sqq69]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Vv6dIZRbY&feature=channel[/url:2z5sqq69]