Michael Betke

Benton: I hired one of the nice coders here from teh forums (Aily) and we worked out a "reflection-node" solution with a complete custom material system. Basically I can place a little sphere, press a key and it renders me a cubemap at this position which get saved. I then can edit it or just use it for a certain place. This way I could place one over the table and use the cubemap for this area only. Reflections are important in arch-viz but also costy for the system. So this solution is a good way. Of course the material system allows me to blur the map, change strenght of the relfection and much more. Athos: I render it with Mentalray. But every other renderer supporting texture baking will do too. Flatiron plugin is used for laying out the sheets. At the moment I have five lightmaps or so. Maybe I will batch them together later. Problem is that I need a new material for every object sharing same textures but different lightmaps. Its a bit tedious to set up. I could do it the lazy way and put all objects on one large lightmap but the resolution would suffer...so a bit learning how to do it best with the available tools. EDIT: Also a small problem, normalmaps dont appear nice on a lightmapped room. Thinking about this too. Maybe a very slight point light or so without shadows.

Okay here we go with some new stuff. Still doing basic things like furniture. Modified the building a bit and added more rooms like some kind of gym and a large bath. Also played more with lightmaps and how to set up the maps in combination with materials. Really missing a material editor here...All in all its coming along nice. Custom cubemaps for some areas and so on. Okay here we go with some new stuff. Still doing basic things like furniture. Modified the building a bit and added more rooms like some kind of gym and a large bath. Also played more with lightmaps and how to set up the maps in combination with materials. Really missing a material editor here...All in all its coming along nice. Custom cubemaps for some areas and so on.

I started working on a case-study I have in mind for over a year now. Its a simple house with large window fronts, modern interiour (loft style) and I hope to be able to push teh limits a bit further here. Masterplan is to release it as a stand-alone and show clients a good interactive walk-through. Attached is a first preview for scale some furniture (grey) and a first lightmap bake. There is still a lot light bleeding at the edges although I use a 4096px map. More to come!

Is it voxels? Like in Cryengine?

Yes you can use the textures of course. Maybe just mixing your normalmap with mine or flipping one normalmap for motion will save some performance but get the result you have in mind.

He sorry. Its just I like to do 3D stuff. You guys can make cool code. I can make cool 3D and can go totally overboard with my requests to coders because I have no clue about it. lol

Thanks for the update. I made a new wavemap for it which is more smooth and not so rippled.More a matter of taste. One small wish: Is it possible to let the foam scroll a bit because if a wave raises and lowers the foam always appears at the same place again so it looks a bit static.

Of course it just makes it more intense but not change the with of the foam making it looking a bit sharp if you have a strenght foam with such a small line of foam.

Would be nice if a slider for "foam-size" would be there too. So the area or foam where it hits the beach or is near an object could be made bigger by the user. Maybe blending two layers of foam together with different textures and moving will bring some more realism into it.

Here, I'm not a coder but I think I can help out with a foam texture which is less tiling. EDIT: Meehh, have problems with recording it as an animation. With my movie .lua to record a fly-through the ocean just does nothing and sits still. :( Ideas on it? Movie link: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11571919/Ocean_Problem_Movie.avi https://dl.dropbox.c...19/foam_new.zip

My small contribution with this really nice ocean shader. Thanks! Keep up the good work.

great addition. can you add some foam to the borders? I could make you a texture for it.

I see the answer is already given. If some questions about models from my shop arise its best to give me a shot via mail. I usually answer within a few hours.

I see. Well I dont think I will support more than 5 file formats. It will be too much work then.

Whats the .blend format?

Hey, I'm going to convert some of my models to make them fit into mobile gaming. I will start with my rocksHD pack. Now I wonder what specs are best. I think around 512px for texture in .dds format and as low polycount as possible without affecting the visuals too much. Can iOS/Android read .dds or is it another format? I wasn't able to find good guidelines for doing game-art for mobile games.

I'm missing some plants on tabel and of course a whip on your tabel to make your furture employees work. It seems to be a nice opportunity in US to get into business right from university. I'm missing this a bit here in Germany but also had nice people around for growing ideas.

This is cool. You will do the models in a modular way? And how do you plan to let the user paint floors, walls and choose a specific type of it or let users paint on the Z-Axis too. At the moment its like a Castle Wolfenstein 3D painter.

They are released. Made a topic at Offtopicforum and forget here. Avalable on my webshop or here on the filebase too.

Okay guys. Its done! At least the Leadwerks version. There are 30 models. Need to do the boring part now. Conversion to other file formats, preview images and video, uploading...writing descriptions

I'm not sure yet about the price. I think a bit more as the usual 20 bucks. Mabe 25 to 30 - Turbosquid more of course....Its always hard to decide. At least i lowered most prices this month on my shop permanently to normal numbers. Like 22€ to 20€ for the packs. Not because I dont sell them but I want clear numbers and not this 24,95...

Here we go with the roundish grey rocks: And the formations I wrote about some time ago. Looks great in a forest and its nice to hide. Stick some old and rotten trees between the trees and place some animated birds and you feel like in a national parc. See also the other two lava-like rocks in the middle. My nice humanoid gives you a impression of scale. Now on with the desert sandstones and some other cliff stuff and its finished! Leadwerks Engine will be released first because I can upload it here

Its cool I have catmull-rom based camera splines in Leadwerks for smooth movie paths. Its great!

Thanks. I did some more lava rocks and now thinking about if I do premade rock formations which are basically a combination of the ones I made. Or if I let the user made them itself. I think drag&drop is easier. Especially for the scaling in Leadwerks its nice. Because there is none...

I think the 150$ I once invested into Leadwerks were one of the best investment I ever made in 3D/CG. I still use the editor regulary and its not bad although I have no clue about .lua coding or whatever has to do with numbers. Of course I miss stuff like a solid material editor and the need to reload the editor after some material changes is annoying on a long term if I see how other tools work. But because I see how other tools work in terms of workflow performance I love the Leadwerks editor. Its simple and fast to use. I hope LE3D won't be a Coder solution only and deliver me the possibility to make great visuals out of the box with the few missing things I would need in LE2.5 now.