Cubemapping intensity?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Cubemapping intensity?
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| Hi! Is there any way to alter the intensity of a standard cubemapping effect? atm all cubemapped objects appear as full mirrored objects. can i decrease the intensity of the effect? i'd like to create objects with slight shininess and slight mirroring (just like a cup of coffee or something). adding extra textures with blendingmodes just lightens or darkens the effect, but it doest not decrease it (alpha loaded textures does not work too). anyone having good advice? |
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| I had some serious trouble with this very issue. I was using a cubemap to provide light and shadows, by capturing the environment around the character and applying the cubemap. The best results, and the ones i was most aiming for, were produced using the inverted cubemap mode. However, i needed to reduce the intensity of the effect, as the character just looked too shiny, like metal or chrome The Fast Extend lib has about 12 different texture blend modes. Maybe one of them could prove useful? Also, have you tried blurring the cubemap? Or creating a really small (8x8) version? |
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| How about a black semi transparent quad in front of the cubemap rendering camera? I remember seeing this somewhere, can't remember where tho :s |
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| The "intensity" of the effect depends on your choice of blend mode. I assume for reflections, you're probably going to want additive blending in which case, the darker the color, the less "intense" the effect. You don't say whether you're loading or rendering a cube map, but if you're loading it, then a black texture with the reflections in dark grey ( or dark shades of any other color if it's a coloured reflection ) should make for a pretty low intensity effect. If you're rendering them, you'll have to process it in some way to keep the color values in the (for example) 0-50 range instead of the 0-255. |
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| I'm sure a lot of you have been dreading this question, but I'm curious; what exactly is cubemapping? |
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| Imagine a skybox ok? Then imagine if you could texture an entity or mesh with a skybox. That essentially it, except it has the properties of a sphere map, where the mapping co-ords automatically alter based on the camera position and viewing angle of the mesh. You can change the cubemapping mode though to give you different effects. |
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| Ah. Check. Thanks. Single. Word. Sentences. Oh. Joy. XD |
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| They are mostly used to give reflections of the surrounding enviroments. You can't really do this with normal mapping or sphere mapping properly. |
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| Well, what I did was copying the model which I will add cube mapping to and add the cubemapping on the copied model then lower it's alpha. |
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| a black semi transparent quad in front of the cubemap rendering camera that's a good way to increase/decrease the intensity of a cubemap texture, have a black, fullbright, quad with variable alpha (depending on the intensity that you want) in front of the camera, entityorder -1, before capturing the scene... |
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