103 – I suck at shaders

After so much time, I still haven't mastered shaders! Not even something simple, like bump mapping with ambient bump mapping and spherical harmonics. I've been always suspecting that there is something wrong with my bump mapping and this comes down to three things:

• My bump maps suck. I have done them myself and while things like the stool seems to work OK, the barrel from some angles always seems to have the metal rings protrude instead of extruding.
• I think that the equations I am using are not exactly correct. The point light one was clearly wrong and I fixed it, but the fix makes no sense mathematically, at least for me.
• The weights of each component are not well enough tuned.

In order to better locate my errors and increase quality, I am going to do three things:

• As a background task, I am going to study in depth (again) normal mapping and spherical harmonics. All the theory that I can get my hands on, making sure that my equations are correct and I understand why.
• Get my hands on some sample normal mapped meshes that I can use as reference and try to improve my own maps.
• Introduce a secondary rendering mode to the engine.

For now I only managed to introduce the new rendering mode. The engine still renders things as it used to, but with the press of a button ('l' in my case) you can switch to a second rendering profile on the fly. Using this I managed to compare parameters more easily and came with an all new rendering profile. Be prepared, because I am going to spam you with before/after screenshots.

So here is a before scene with a  lot of barrels and stools:

And the after shot:

Notice the added depth illusion on the barrels and stools, but also it is pretty clear that the rings on the barrel are not extruding the right way. I am going to go around this scene and post before/after comparisons form different angles:

Getting those images aligned in Blogger was harder than needed :). I hope they are in the correct order. The effect is customizable. Here is another profile that should look exactly the same to you, unless you know what to look for, and even then it will probably looks the same. Well, it is subtly different and alters the properties of light circling objects.

You can come up with a ton of settings and the parameters have a wide range of valid values. Here is what happens if you go outside the valid values:

I kind of like the new profile. I can't wait to get my hand on some proper normal mapped meshes done by professionals and use them to fine tune my new profile. Also, spherical harmonics produce some unnatural results for quite a few input values with this new profile (carefully avoided these values for the screenshots), so that should be also put on the list of things to fix.

But in my engine I don't have only one light source. Let's try out the personal torch, which in the new skill tree will actually be a spell in which you need to invest ability points:

From the front it makes a big difference, because there are two lights meeting heads on. From behind, there is less of a difference between the two profiles. The personal light is best used at night though:

This was from behind, with the moon illuminating the front of the objects. Let's take a look at a shot from the front, where we can see first only the moon light in the two profiles in dark, then with the personal light on:

I grow tired of these orderly scenes:

So, what do you think? I think this is a massive improvement. I still need to try it out with some proper normal maps. I hope I can fix spherical harmonics and get my hands on multiple sky-boxes, so we can see the harmonics in action, with the skybox contributing in real time to the illumination of objects (the contribution is minor). If I somehow am not able to fix the harmonics with this new profile, I might get rid of the atmospheric illumination element of shading. It is cool, but not really needed.