A Whole New World

Last class we were shown a little bit about shaders, and quite frankly it was a little much to take in at one time. But hopefully as time goes on and I continue to explore the world of shaders I will come to understand what the strange man at the of the class is talking about. Though some of what I did understand was vertex shaders, or at least the theory regarding them.

From what Professor Hogue (aka Shaderman) taught us last week, vertex shaders dont actually change the vertices or geometry of the objects in any way but instead change the characteristics of the object to achieve numerous different effects. One such effect, or technique, is bump mapping which does not change the shape of the object but instead changes the data of the normals of the object to give it the illusion of having all these additional details such as cuts, cracks, and bumps when in reality it is just a simple shape.

I took a couple of screen shots from a game I am currently playing called Guild Wars 2 while playing around with the options to see all the different shaders they implemented within the game and I found that the following two shots best show the effect of bump mapping.

This shot was taken with all the setting on low or off

 Now as can be seen in the image above the terrain is as more or less flat, even the stone walkways seem flat but look what happens when the shaders option is cranked up to maximum.

Shaders!

Now look at that! Now the terrain way more interesting, the sand looks wavy and uneven and the walkways have some depth to them. I am definitely looking forward to implementing this technique within our game, though it is unfortunate that I do not have any code to show just yet as I am still trying to wrap my head around how this works. Anyways, till next time! Laters!

Yo bro, I heard you like shaders. So I put shaders on your shaders!

So its the new semester, cold as hell, and morning classes still suck. Sounds like a great time to learn shaders!

Last friday we were introduced to the wondrous world of shaders and the immense power they hold. We saw many examples of how shaders could greatly improve the aesthetic of our games allowing us to provide greater graphical fidelity within our work. In order to give us an idea of how much shaders could help the appearance of our games we were tasked with taking screenshots of our game and going at it with Photoshop in order to make it look "pretty". 

The game, Luna, takes place over the span of a day so we really want to take advantage of the shading and and lighting effects that shaders grants us to really show the progression of the day through the changing of these effects to create visually interesting levels and to really immerse the players into the beautiful world of Luna. 

We also want to take advantage of normal mapping for our models, specifically for our character and enemy models, so as to create detailed and visually pleasing models while not sacrificing processing speed. We also want to make use of bloom which will help in creating a softer, almost magical, look to the world. 

Hopefully when it's finished it will exceed, or at the very least resemble, these pictures.