Double Feature request!
by Andrea Barolo · in Torque 3D Professional · 07/24/2009 (1:33 am) · 4 replies
First of all I would like to congratulate for T3d! It's coming along really nicely. Featurewise there is almost nothing I could ask for, but I would like to know if there are two improvements in the roadmap:
1 - Scattersky: as it's working now it's really interesting. I've used it only in the editor so i don't know if something is better exposed in script, but, the rayleigh scattering is in my opininon a bit too strong. If I increase it to have a red sky during sunset the sky will stay yellow for all the day. On the other way around, if i set it to have a blue sky during day then it becomes only a little yellow during sunset. Would be pretty to have it a bit more controllable. Like to have the ability too choose color or to have color ramps to set the shades. To me it's really not important to have it phisically accurate but better to have it a little bit more artist friendly.
2 - Decals on dynamic shapes: I'm working on a naval game (sort of) so I would like to have ships scorched by cannons fire during the battle. To have this I'd need decals to applay where cannonballs hit the ship. Will decals work on dynamic shapes in the final release?
1 - Scattersky: as it's working now it's really interesting. I've used it only in the editor so i don't know if something is better exposed in script, but, the rayleigh scattering is in my opininon a bit too strong. If I increase it to have a red sky during sunset the sky will stay yellow for all the day. On the other way around, if i set it to have a blue sky during day then it becomes only a little yellow during sunset. Would be pretty to have it a bit more controllable. Like to have the ability too choose color or to have color ramps to set the shades. To me it's really not important to have it phisically accurate but better to have it a little bit more artist friendly.
2 - Decals on dynamic shapes: I'm working on a naval game (sort of) so I would like to have ships scorched by cannons fire during the battle. To have this I'd need decals to applay where cannonballs hit the ship. Will decals work on dynamic shapes in the final release?
About the author
#2
07/27/2009 (8:13 am)
WEE! Thanks for the quick answers! We don't really need decals for skinned meshes but for animable meshes yes. So if you include this feature for 1.0 it would be really useful for me! 
#3
07/27/2009 (9:10 am)
For the hard case, I think it could be done entirely via a shader on the skinned meshes: store the decal transform information in shader constants, then have the shader use the information to calculate UV coordinates for each decal, which are used in clamped to draw the decal over the model in the correct position. 
#4
07/27/2009 (3:55 pm)
@Manoel - Yea... that was one approch i was considering. Gonna be pixel shader heavy... maybe make it a SM 3.0 only feature... but it would work. Unfortunately we're still stuck in DX9 world... i want to do the same technique as they do in Dice's Frostbite Engine in the future. 
Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
We've found its very hard to tweak the ScatterSky as well. Ideally you could adjust the mie and rayleigh values at different times of day and have them interpolate across them. I don't think thats gonna make 1.0, but i expect it to happen on a future release.
There is an easy case and a hard case.
The easy case is a decal on a model that is dynamic in its transform. Like a barrel that is shot gets a decal then falls over and rolls away. Here the decal just needs to exist in object space and inherit the model's transform.
The hard case is a decal on a model that deforms via skinning. In this case the decal has to be recalculated every frame.
We might find some time to get the easy case working for 1.0... but i'm making no promises. Worst case Torque 3D 1.1.
The hard case won't happen for a while. We probably need a fundementally different type of decal system in that case.