19 June 2010

Texture mapping

At last I had to walk my way to texture blending, in order to dress the naked gouraud-shaded thingy. But I wanted to experience a compositing approach to textures where 4 luma-only patterns (say “desaturated” textures) get blended together within a weighted sum, and then colorized. This way less memory is touched (only 3 fetches). It's thus faster, yet enables a variety of materials.
This weird choise is not casual. Indeed I had in mind to stick this stuff into a fixed function configuration, in order to push the old OpenGL API (1.2.1) to its limits and see what I can get. Well, the texture blending I can get is shown in this video:



So now there is another 3D engine in the world, that would look pretty good if it were developed 15 years ago, but is kind of ugly compared with modern today stuff. It is tiny, coarse, fast. It is built around a procedural terrain generator and a LOD algorithm for terrains that doesn't require precomputed data and enables run-time continuous streamlined exploration.

Here are a couple of further videos for the archive: