Soft Shadows

Just a quick preview of things to come!

Core changes

Not much to show at this time, but I've been making a lot of progress lately. I ran into a few snags while working on my Statuary app, so I decided to re-evaluate some core rendering code and make it more complete. I had previously been taking a few shortcuts which had worked at the time, but in practice it turns out the engine needed more flexibility. Although it's a setback, this is the exact reason I wanted to make this app: to see how well the Silverback3D engine works in a real-life situations and what features it needs to be fully functional.


New engine functionality that is either in progress or completed:

• Optimized simple shadows
• Normal mapping (only object space for now)
• Significant performance improvements by switching from arrays to vectors
• Polygon picking

Statuary

After taking a fair amount of time off, I've finally been able to get back to this project and make some headway on an idea I've had floating around my head for a while. A 3D engine is rewarding to make, but in the end it's always more fun to actually do something with it.

My main goals with this app are to show off what Silverback3D is capable of and put the engine through its paces to find any shortcomings.

This is a rough first draft and only includes 1/3 of my plans for the final application, but I thought it would be fun to put it out there and get some initial feedback.

Link: [Statuary]

Environment Mapping

I've added new environment mapping code which is both faster and provides more accurate results than the old code.

All of the available rendering styles are available in this demo, which allows you to choose a) model, b) texture, and c) render mode.

Small steps

The bad news: I don't have too much to show for my last few days of work. The good news: I've been spending my time cleaning up all of my current code to get it ready for an alpha release.

I'm finding that's it's a great learning experience to go back over all of my code and look at it from an 'outside perspective'. It's forced me to clean up a lot of ugly code, prune everything down to only what is truly needed, and document things in much more detail than I normally would.

I've also spent a bit of time adding content to my Google Code page (link on the right ->) and I plan to continue to add more over the next few weeks.

3DS importer

After working around a few server issues I've finished writing the 3ds file importer. It's currently able to load in mesh data and texture mapping information. I'd like to eventually update the importer to also deal with things like smoothing groups and materials.

I have a simple example available of the loader in action here. The model is just a sample 3ds file that I found at this site.

I have also created a Google Code page for this project. There isn't much content on it yet, but it will be added to over time. I'm planning on posting an alpha release of the code in the near future.

Back in business

It's been far too long since I've made any progress on this project, due to lots of things happening in 'real life'. The good news is that I sat down last night and pounded out a .3ds file importer. There are still a few bugs to iron out, but I should have a working demo up in a day or two.

This site was extremely helpful in figuring out how the files are laid out.