Side Projections or Decals or what?
by James Brad Barnette · in Torque 3D Professional · 06/30/2009 (11:12 am) · 6 replies
Are side projections going to happen? if they are not can Decals be made to receive lighting and shadow info as they will work just as well. The only draw back to them is they do not seem to support lighting information which in my opinion is a pretty big limitation on decals in general. This mean is people are shooting in a relatively dark environment then you are go to the the bullet holes light up like Christmas lights.
But I have tried a few decals to cover bad spot with terrain stretching and this works great we just need to them to obey the lighting and receive shadows.
But I have tried a few decals to cover bad spot with terrain stretching and this works great we just need to them to obey the lighting and receive shadows.
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#2
06/30/2009 (2:27 pm)
Hmm that other thread sounds pretty discouraging. Hope something happens as of right now they are useless and might as well not even be there. I hope the perspective from that thread changes cause the impression I got seems to be that they don't think that they can fix it. 
#3
Still we also think using a ton of decals is a good way to decorate things out. At the moment to get lighting on a decal you have to set the blend operation to None and enable alpha test.
While this works for some rougher decals it isn't ideal for all of them.
This is where blending comes in which is something we're working on.
Blending without normal mapping is easy... as we don't have to do any lighting and can just absorb the lighting of the surface the decal is applied to. We plan to support that mode.
Blending with normal mapping is the harder issue... and it is being working on. ;)
06/30/2009 (6:16 pm)
@James - Side projection will be in beta4 for those cases.Still we also think using a ton of decals is a good way to decorate things out. At the moment to get lighting on a decal you have to set the blend operation to None and enable alpha test.
While this works for some rougher decals it isn't ideal for all of them.
This is where blending comes in which is something we're working on.
Blending without normal mapping is easy... as we don't have to do any lighting and can just absorb the lighting of the surface the decal is applied to. We plan to support that mode.
Blending with normal mapping is the harder issue... and it is being working on. ;)
#4
06/30/2009 (6:27 pm)
The other thing to note... while we've done alot of work to support tons of decals. Huge decals can become a performance problem if they have too many triangles.
#5
06/30/2009 (8:31 pm)
cool, looking forward to the future :)
#6
07/01/2009 (7:33 am)
was looking at the Crysis editor last night and it seems that they are using decals for this purpose as well. 
Associate Manoel Neto
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The problem is that currently there is no way to blend into the normals prepass buffer, which is needed to create layered effects like decals that react to light properly.