Lighting vs. Texture Shadows
I'm not sure exactly how crazy this sounds yet... because I have to get a bit more game engine stuff done before I can run some more solid tests (Android... 1 Ghz phones or better) but if I am going to be using OpenGL lighting, how important is drawn shadows and highlights on textures?
I ask this partially as a struggling texture artist who hasn't quite learned enough to make a texture look proper yet. I drool at the low poly contest entries...
In any event, some simple tests seem to show that fairly flat colors come out reasonably well with OpenGL lighting, but would be be a better practice to supplement it somewhat with texturing?
I ask this partially as a struggling texture artist who hasn't quite learned enough to make a texture look proper yet. I drool at the low poly contest entries...
In any event, some simple tests seem to show that fairly flat colors come out reasonably well with OpenGL lighting, but would be be a better practice to supplement it somewhat with texturing?
Replies
http://wiki.polycount.com/LightMap
I suppose I can go with more simple single textures and OpenGL Lighting (1 or 2 at most) and see how it goes and if it really is too slow, disable them and go back to the drawing board on the textures.
I'm gathering that LightMaps are used for environment that doesn't move, and color array light direction + normal map + color map with Dot3 blending for characters is the way to go?
It's beginning to sound like a damned if I do and if I don't situation... if the specs don't work out but I'm thinking they really should be okay.
A good example of painted-in lighting.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=74450
... which you could augment with in-game lighting, like Quake Live does.
So the honest truth... is that of all the things I'm tackling for this project, the textures are my worst fear of completely screwing up if I go with all drawn in lighting. I was really hoping that OpenGL lighting would be an option and would just cover my deficiencies... It's already slow going and learning this is going to add a lot of time... I guess that's that name of the game though.
Okay... so I guess I have this plan...
I'm probably going to go ahead and setup a test case and see exactly how using OpenGL lighting performs. It may be inevitable that it'll be too slow, but it still might work with the game style I have in mind, it's more of a turn based rpg feel and will have small areas at a time (A la Vagrant Story) so there is still a hope that the GL lighting will be okay.
If I do drop them... is this a relatively decent procedure (partially taken from the SoilChild texture tutorial here...)?
1. Lay down basic colors.
2. Setup lighting and Bake the lights/AO in a separate image.
3. Overlay those in the image editor over the basic colors...
4. Fine tune from there...
PS... any thoughts on the shoulder progress?
I shouldn't quite say it like that... there's a stubborn child, dreaming somewhere inside me that wants to achieve this alone... but there's also 33 year old family man with a full time job who has to be realistic... sooo if you're interested... :poly121:
Depending on the game and the assets you could probably experiement with baking and painting in some really advanced lighting. You also might want to look into vertex colors and lighting, they can be a cheap way to really punch up the lighting, as well as baking lighting into objects without baking it into the diffuse materials. Basically using tiles and unique shadows without realtime lighting.
I don't think it's feasible to use normalmaps on a cellphone, but you will be able to use a specular map to fake some depth, simply by having the deeper parts be less specular. But it depends a bit on the materials too.
What type of game and models will you be working with?
I don't believe that I can use specular shading with OpenGL ES 1.1, (I'm just not familiar with 2.0 to switch to GLSL).
I've still got a lot of testing to do to really feel out what my actual polycount and lighting limitations are going to be on the hardware, so poly-limits are hard to quote at the moment. The main character model I'm working on I hope to keep to no more than 2000 tris. Once he's done, I'll put together a simple room, some other objects, turn on lights and start moving everything around and see what I get.
Android phones are really coming a long way and I think maybe are being under estimated a bit, but of course I'll have to put my money where my mouth is when the time comes to prove it.