[WIP] Precipice

[Siliconmaster]

lulz....how did con do the lightning?

Oh haha. As I remember, he said he used shaders with a long strip of single pixels. A few of them were white, and the rest were transparent. He set them to scroll, and when you have a few of them in the sky, it makes really nice random lightning flashes.

[sleepy1212]

Oh haha. As I remember, he said he used shaders with a long strip of single pixels. A few of them were white, and the rest were transparent. He set them to scroll, and when you have a few of them in the sky, it makes really nice random lightning flashes.

Awesome, wanted to do almost the same thing but i wasn't sure how good it would actually look. Now that i see it looks really great i think i might give a go.

[Con]

There's one map that's static and doesn't move. That's the mask for the plane itself so just make its alpha a fuzzy blob. Then add a new map and this will be the long skinny scrolling texture. It only needs to be 4 pixels tall and have the alpha have vertical strips of white every once and a while. You can even put a fade on them by adding grey pixels to either side. Then you just need to adjust the horizontal scaling of this map so it's 1/width in pixels. Set its alpha to multiply and its colour can be next map or current, depending on which of the two maps you want to use for the colour of the lightning. What you can do is for each plane in the sky you map this to you slide the UV mapped polygons over a number of full texture lengths in the UV editor. This means they won't all flash at the same time but rather have a delay or a pseudo-random look.

The planes were placed above the cloud layer and I made the clouds slightly transparent in the areas of the the lightning. This makes it look like it's happening inside the cloud instead of in front of it.

If you want to make visible lightning bolts all you need to do is change that first maps alpha from a fuzzy blob to a lightning bolt.

[Siliconmaster]

It's 3:45 am EST, and thanks to some help from Firescythe, I've just made a major breakthrough with Precipice lightmapping. Not only are the uvs only mildly screwed up in this build, but the lightmap rendering actually seems to be running fairly smoothly for once. I made some test renders with only the sun and its skylight counterpart, and then another few for one of the banshee pads.







Blue Banshee Pad (In Shadow)


Red Banshee Pad (In Sunlight)


Red Banshee Pad (Lit)


Red Pad Teleporter Room


I'll run all the lightmaps with all the lights on overnight and post the results tomorrow. For now, time to crash.

[Con]

woo, looks good so far

[Reaper Man]

Looking awesome man!

[sleepy1212]

beautiful, that is all :clap:

[POQPrince]

FANTASTIC!

[Siliconmaster]

Glad you guys like it. However, I have some more eyecandy for you: The full lightmaps just finished, and I have to say, for the first real test, these are gorgeous. They definitely need some work, but hell, this is far better than I had hoped for.

[ghk]

awesome...lets play :-)