Demo Questions

[Calowell]

Hi,

 

I am new to the community and have a few questions about the leadwerks engine. It's greatly appreciated if anyone would answer my questions.

 

Firstly, is the demo not suppose to come with some conversion tools? After installing I was under the assumption that I would have some convertors to get these .dae files I have into their .gmf format. I would have liked to test the import capabilities of assets, in particular skinned + animated meshes, and would hate to find any 'quarks' in the process since I'm probably not using the DCC application that most are using to creating their content. (I just hate the thought of buying an engine that supports collada, and then my 3d package that writes the .dae files may have the rotational axes screwed up, or not properly exporting vertex normals.) I'd just feel better if I could test this somehow.

 

Also, the demo that I installed is currently 2.3, and while I find the renderer to be very rich, beautiful, and fast, I am getting these shadow drawing errors as found in this

. What's the current release of leadwerks, and can someone verify that this has been fixed?

 

Lastly, I would like to know what the difference is between a "True" Deffered renderer and the "Light Pre-Pass" technique that I keep seeing older render engines implementing. It seems to me that a lot of the engines using this Light prepass technique still use some form of volume or boxed method for occlusion culling to speed up the drawing process. But sometime ago I thought I had read something where someone had brought this topic up, and and the developer of leadwerks had replied with something along the lines of ~ "If its not seen, it doesnt get rendered." Is this something inherent in the design of a "true" deferred render? One where it does not require "traditional" occlusion culling techniques? Or is Light Pre-Pass and deferred rendering one and the same?

 

I guess I am not entirely sure on what I am asking, but if someone could provide me few sentences, in laymen terms, what the difference between the two is (if any). That would be great.

 

~ Thank you for your time

[Josh]

Firstly, is the demo not suppose to come with some conversion tools? After installing I was under the assumption that I would have some convertors to get these .dae files I have into their .gmf format. I would have liked to test the import capabilities of assets, in particular skinned + animated meshes, and would hate to find any 'quarks' in the process since I'm probably not using the DCC application that most are using to creating their content. (I just hate the thought of buying an engine that supports collada, and then my 3d package that writes the .dae files may have the rotational axes screwed up, or not properly exporting vertex normals.) I'd just feel better if I could test this somehow.

If you post a couple files you can probably get someone here to convert them for you to see. Version 3.0 will streamline the conversion process more.

 

Also, the demo that I installed is currently 2.3, and while I find the renderer to be very rich, beautiful, and fast, I am getting these shadow drawing errors as found in this

. What's the current release of leadwerks, and can someone verify that this has been fixed?

This problem has been resolved.

 

Lastly, I would like to know what the difference is between a "True" Deffered renderer and the "Light Pre-Pass" technique that I keep seeing older render engines implementing. It seems to me that a lot of the engines using this Light prepass technique still use some form of volume or boxed method for occlusion culling to speed up the drawing process. But sometime ago I thought I had read something where someone had brought this topic up, and and the developer of leadwerks had replied with something along the lines of ~ "If its not seen, it doesnt get rendered." Is this something inherent in the design of a "true" deferred render? One where it does not require "traditional" occlusion culling techniques? Or is Light Pre-Pass and deferred rendering one and the same?

 

I guess I am not entirely sure on what I am asking, but if someone could provide me few sentences, in laymen terms, what the difference between the two is (if any). That would be great.

It appears that technique merges combined light info, which will always cause lighting inaccuracies because you won't know how much each light is responsible for the values when you perform the lighting equation, so it seems kind of silly. I recognized early on that deferred rendering is the only technique that makes sense, and Crytek recently switched to using it. I think GG is just trying to support older hardware with their pre-pass technique, but it doesn't really matter anymore because everyone has GEForce 8+ hardware, and the people who don't aren't going to care about advanced lighting anyways. So it's like you're dumbing down the lighting to make people with GEForce 7's happy, which is an awkward hardware level to target.

[Richard Simpson]

I can convert those files for you. I don't have much experience in converting animated meshes. But I can give them a go. Just send me a PM if you are interested