Leadwerks Engine 2.43, advanced optics, and more...
Entry posted by Josh ·
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Leadwerks Engine 2.43
...will be released tomorrow, along with a new source distro. I've fixed a number of bugs, but I don't like compiling releases when I am tired because there's a lot of little steps to mess up, so I will do it in the morning.
Leadwerks Engine 3
Optics was always my favorite subject in physics, and I've been getting some amazing results lately by modeling computer graphics after real lighting phenomena.
Once I decided to make the materials system like 3ds max, everything became easy. The engine chooses an "ubershader" variation based on what texture slots a material has a texture assigned to. Creating a normal mapped material is as easy as creating a material and adding two textures. The engine will assume texture slot 0 is the diffuse map and slot 1 is the normal map, and will load a shader based on that. Predefined slots include diffuse, normal, specular, displacement, reflection, emission, refraction, and opacity maps. Of course, you can still explicitly assign a shader if you need something special. The material below was created just by dragging some textures into different slots and adjusting their strength:
Cubemaps are built into the model ubershader, and there's support for reflection, refraction, or both using a fresnel term to combine them. Chromatic aberrtion is also supported, which splits refracted light into its RGB components:
While I was getting into all these advanced optics, I decided to take a stab at color grading, and the results are great. You create a 3D texture (it's easier than it sounds) which gets used as a color lookup table in the post-processing filter. To make a new color table you can just run the source 2D image through a photoshop filter and save it. Color grading gives a scene an overall feel and makes colors look consistent. It's a technique that's used extensively in film, starting with 2000's Oh Brother Where Art Thou:
Here's anpther example:
And here's a simple shot in the engine. The original:
And graded with a "cool" color table:
It's more advanced than just tinting the screen a certain color, because this effect will actually emphasize a range of colors.
Preparing the Asset Store
Now that Leadwerks.com is hosted on our own dedicated server, I was able to create a more secure folder to store asset store files in that can only be accessed by the forum system. Previously, we had dynamic download URLs working, but the same file could still be downloaded from any browser within a few minutes before the dynamic URL changed. This will give better security for asset store merchants. According to my big flowchart, the only things left to do are to fix the side-scrolling main page and set up a merchant account with our bank, and then we'll be ready to launch.
Great movie and soundtrack, by the way:
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