Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Comparison Shots

Here we go. Like I said, this isn't really noticeable in static screenshots, but anyway...

The top one is the original shader, the bottom is my replacement.





First of all, ignore the framerate differences. This just comes from writing the image to file and sometimes it shows up in a screenshot, sometimes it doesn't.

Secondly, I did warn you that it wasn't very noticeable in screenshots.

The places to look are around the seat padding. This is actually a single flat surface in the map. Notice in the original that the bumpmapping is smudgy, blurred and quite indistinct, whereas in my replacement it's tight and well-defined. That's the key difference.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

That does look a little bit cleaner, I'm sure the difference is more percievable in motion.

The specular reflections seem to be more precise, makes me wonder if a side effect of this is more visible specular aliasing?

Chip said...

Indeed, the leathery aspect is now more metallic.

Doomicon said...

Wow! The lines are much cleaner, not as muddled.

mhquake said...

"Clean" is exactly what I thought. I think it's awesome; it's not a radical gfx overhaul, just a few tweaks of what was already there (which is my own personal preference) but it really does lift it to another level.

@Chip: that may be because the specular curve is no longer clamped from 0 to 1, nor is certain other lighting.

Anonymous said...

While I obviously haven't seen them in motion. There's only one thing I'd love to see cleaned up in your versions. That is the bright "stitching" in the leather, "grout" in the tile, and edge on the chair rail.

I'm sure there's a mathematical explanation, but it does look "funny". Otherwise it looks good.

Anonymous said...

You mentioned early that you removed the red\Alpha flip. To my knowledge that was done to add precision to the Normal map decode. Are those shots comparing the closed executable verses all of your work or are they both running from your source builds?

Meaning: perhaps you lost precision due to the red\alpha revert and you regained it by brute calculation in the Fragment Shaders?

mhquake said...

"You mentioned early that you removed the red\Alpha flip. To my knowledge that was done to add precision to the Normal map decode. Are those shots comparing the closed executable verses all of your work or are they both running from your source builds?

Meaning: perhaps you lost precision due to the red\alpha revert and you regained it by brute calculation in the Fragment Shaders?
"

Neither; I'm not using the pre-compressed normal maps, just loading the original TGAs directly. They don't have the channels swapped so the swap back isn't necessary.

Anonymous said...

"While I obviously haven't seen them in motion. There's only one thing I'd love to see cleaned up in your versions. That is the bright "stitching" in the leather, "grout" in the tile, and edge on the chair rail.

I'm sure there's a mathematical explanation, but it does look "funny". Otherwise it looks good."

It looks like it's supposed to look; it's mathematically closer to the ground truth this way. What you mention should be fixed in the specular maps themselves.
Obviously the artists couldn't look 7 years into the future :)

Anonymous said...

What do you think of using Render to Vertex Buffer (R2VB) for the Shadow Volume construction?

ATI

http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/s2006c03/scheuermann.pdf

Anonymous said...

I'm wondering if you will be developing a d3d port?

The reason being is I always wanted to try doom 3 in 3d.

Pieter said...

I've been playing through again with an improved interaction shader.

The difference is very noticable!
The textures suddenly feel much more high res, all the murkiness of the original is gone. I was also able to put in some ambient light.
0.1 along with the defaul lightscale make this game that much more fun.
You can't see very clear in the dark, but enough to make out the corners of the room. As such you don't feel so impaired in your movement and you can play much more aggresively. It definatly helps.

Also, interestingly, disabling the no-selfshadowing flag on characters, combined with the improved normals make their faces seem that much more alive.

Anonymous said...

Damn interesting + looks great!