Santa has landed in his "Sleigh"

[Osram]

Here's a picture of him after he landed his "sleigh" :


Seriously, this scene has been created with BoB2's Skinner Pack that is currently WIP, se other thread. I have by now far exceeded the wishes that people on this site told me about .

The screenie shows a bit of the power of the S.P.; The reflections of the bowsers and the camouflage net for example, although in practice to keep fps up one will probably even for shiny stuff like bare metal planes use more or less generic environments, like for example even Half Life 2 does.

The main reason to create this picture was to learn and to improve BoB/ the skinner pack/ documentations in the process.

The Pack will go public soonish (OTOH if someone wants to join the closed team now and give feedback, he is welcome to PM / email me).
Some technical notes on the screenie are here:
The A2A Simulations Community • View topic - Santa has landed in his "Sleigh"

One big feature of the S.P. is the support in several ways for shaders; And with shaders in turn you can use basically any sort of texture known to mankind, like diffuse map of course, gloss map, spec map, bump map, normal map, "material ID map", or in this case environment map.

[Hunhunter]

Fantastic work Osram!! Sadly, the big red & white guy did not bring me your sim for christmas so it looks like i'm gonna have to shell out on it myself It may have to wait a short while though as there are mutterings about a new PC incoming!!

[adlabs6]

Wow, very nice. That looks like a reflection of the 3D surroundings, Indeed most games use a generic image for reflections like you said, which is probably easier to run. Mixed into a complete scheme it will be really fine looking.

In the linked thread you mention issues like normals being shown up with these shaders. Don't be too upset on this, I've got payware addons in FS2004 that have the same issues. Only when there are heavy meshes can this be overcome, but then there is always the complaint of fps hits.

A thoughtful, lighter mesh with a great shader works best IMO.

[Osram]

Hunhunter, thanks for the nice words.

adlabs6, yupp, the environment map was created by the game engine itself from the surroundings.

BTW, when I said generic, I meant an environment map of the level, but taken from one position and without movable objects. AFAIK one job for a level artist in say HL2 is to define one or a few points from where the env map is to be taken. Of course the character is normally somewhere else in the level so the map is not 100% exact, but the env map is normally used as a very subtle effect on dull stuff or mainly a bright/dark texture on reflecting stuff like metal (IOW you do not see specific items in the map), so it does not matter. Oh well, we will see how it will turn on on say a bare metal plane.

One good use for the env map in BoB will probably be the glasses on the dials - they are off course always at the same position relative to the rest of the cockpit, so it should be quite sufficient to take one envmap and not change it over time.

[Osram]

About the normals, there are mainly two things:

Indeed as you say a low poly model will not have great normals, as simply the info from the few vertices is not enough. What can and should be done is make a very high poly count mesh - say a million polys (done with NURBS modelling for example. From this create the in game model and then you can use both as input to a tool, which then calculates a normal map. So you have the normal info from the high poly count one,but th rendering speed of the low poly one . For example, ATI did this in the demo that partly inspired the "Santa's Spit".

Besides too little info due to comparatively low poly count, there is also the case of wrong info, for example due to the normals being not continuous across seams between sub-objects. This is indeed one issue. With the standard lighting we shipped with this was very hard to see.

[adlabs6]

Ah. Well it's interesting to hear this might work in the cockpit on the gauges. If there is head bobbing action during aircraft manuvers, that will have a great look of depth.

From my painting experience in FS2004, I think their EV map is very heavily blurred so as to show almost no details at all. This could help simulate that many metals are blurry reflections for objects more than a few inches/feet away.

[Osram]

Ah. Well it's interesting to hear this might work in the cockpit on the gauges. If there is head bobbing action during aircraft manuvers, that will have a great look of depth.

Yes. Or if you move your head with TrackIR 6DOF or with keys. An important feature in BoB is to stick the head out of the canopy during T/O and especially landing.

From my painting experience in FS2004, I think their EV map is very heavily blurred so as to show almost no details at all. This could help simulate that many metals are blurry reflections for objects more than a few inches/feet away.

Yes, I am not surprised. Also it helps hide the effect that it is proabbly "generic" as well in the sense I mentioned. If you taxi by another plane or a hangar, and it would be clearly visible and would keep being reflected in one spot on the plane if your eye moves with the plane, that would look quite odd . So, such details get blurred away.

[adlabs6]

Incase you don't have FS2004, here is a shot of dynamic shines on the Dreamwings ERJ-145. This is at 27,500 altitude, and it's identical on the ground and for all planes.

[Vigilante]

Wow - that's gorgeous, but I have to wonder if all that processing power could not be used to better effect on scenery? At any rate, I imagine that, if we live long enough, we'll be able to have that cake and eat it, too.

[Osram]

Thanks Adlabs, very interesting screenie. I indeed do not have MSFS 2004; I had bought the 2002 Pro one for the gmax game pack.

BTW, does CFS 3 support such textures as well?

Vigilante, correct, there will have to be a compromise between what is possible and fps . But for me as coder, especially of a modding tool like the Skinner's Pack, it is important to make it possible. Then a) one can measure fps with the different options like no environment map, static one or changing one and b) people might get good ideas like the "for the cockpit glass it is basically static anyway!"

And like you say the computer power rises all the time so it makes sense to "aim high" regarding what is possible.