Now I know there are a handful of lighting errors, but these shots were taken from a test compile. I hope that adding "-samples 8 -samplesize1 -super 8" will smooth most of that out, though I'll probably be looking at an overnight compile at that point ;^)
Notice that a decent framerate is still to be had even when you are standing on the roof and look all the way down onto the brush-terrain debris-laden statuary! That took some careful portal manipulation, and was quite a pain in the arse!
Let me know what you think, I'd appreciate it greatly.
Man, really nice architecture and attention to detail. The lighting indoors is quite cool and moody. Are those shaders for the stained glass? Looks sweet, nice work.
-clu
WHOA! :D Seriously. I love the windows.
I'm with Leslie. I love the windows!
I'd love to see the shader files for it. Great work!
Man I love the stained glass windows also. The make it look more like a chapel/church feel on the inside. Plus, they keep the sun from shining in bright :D
good job rgoer!:D
Thanks for the replies! Praise from Eldritch and LJ? I feel like I'm getting a "thumbs-up" from "on high." ;^)
In any case: the windows are a lot simpler than you guys think. I scoured google images for abstract (that is, not obviously, subjectively christian/judaic/islamic) stained glass windows and stumbled upon these four (part of a set of six) about fifty pages into the results. In anycase, when it came time to have the light from the windows on the indside, I sat there and examined them closely, noticing a few very important things.
One: in each window, there are really only three colors present (red, blue, and yellow, each rather de-saturated). Two: if you divide the winows into sections, there will be one color that dominates any given section. Three: a clever beam shader is really all it will take to sell the effect, so a lightmap is probably unnecessary.
So now, the setup: First, there are three light entities (I think they ended up staying at 300 intensity, maybe only 100) per window, stacked vertically along the windows' center-lines and at the one-third divisions. I gave each light a color value that corresponds to whichever color (of the desaturated red, blue, or yellow) was "dominant" for that "third" of the window. You'll notice that one of the windows isn't casting any yellow light, since there wasn't much yellow in that window at all. Finally, three beam shaders were made, corresponding to the three desaturated colors of the window. I made sure their "tcMod Scroll" properties were slightly different in non-rhythmic offsets, so the total additive effect will look somewhat random, and rather pleasing. These beam shaders were then placed onto nested patch forms that conform to the windows' gothic arch outlines. The patch forms were nested so as to prevent z-fighting, but not so much so that the player should be able to notice three distinct "beams" rather than one additively chromatic "uber-beam." Check chapel17.jpg (the last image of my second post on this page), and you'll probably be able to see the breakdown of the three "sub-beams."
So yeah, the windows don't involve any super-fancy shader construction (unless you consider "surfaceparm trans" "cull none" and "glFunc add" to be "super-fancy"), but I think the effect comes off ok anyway ;^)
Hey it looks great, can wait to play when its released to the public!
Very nice work with the beam shaders! It really gives it a sense of atmosphere. One comment, and one suggestion: the beam shaders "cut through" the sills of the windows, I'd sugegst you shrink the sills or build your beam around it, to look more natural. Also...why not go the extra mile and make the colored shadows the windows would cast on the floor? I see two ways to do this...One, just put your 3 light entities horizontally on the floor, with decreased light values, or, the more involved but potentially cooler version, desaturate the window image even MORE and make a glowing "decal" shader out of it to put on the floor.
Also very nice curve work in the exterior areas.
Good luck with the rest of the map!
Very good. But they should be a little bigger, not the same size as the windows themselves. Do you know what I think?
Also may need to soften/blur and lower the opacity a bit to make it a bit more convincing.
-clu
Good suggestions, fellas. LJ: the light decals are much longer than the windows, you just can't tell from this angle. They aren't any wider, though, I'll have to think about whether I want to do that or not; it's hard to get sun-rays to break parallel--check the light from the sun through any window, it's almost always longer or shorter than the height of the window, but almost never any different in width.
Definitely need to desaturate/darken and add some blur to the decals, though, good call.