|
March 11, 2008. Maya normal map tutorial. |
|
Added a new video tutorial about how
to visualize correctly the normal maps created from xNormal in the Maya's realtime
viewport.
More information in the tutorials section. |
 |
|
|
February 24, 2008. xNormal v3.14.3 released. |
|
Now you can specify secondary and tertiary light colors to simulate multiple lights
in the 3D viewer. Although this is a trick
I think it works very well !
Added more control to the fine detail. Now you can use the scale factor to control
the elavation of the height map and also to specify the heights-to-normals algorithm.
Some minor bugs were solved too. |
 |
|
|
February 9, 2008. xNormal v3.14.2 released. |
|
Now you can specify the "smooth normals" option for the highpoly meshes ( why I
didn't put this option before? ).
Added a "mesh scale" option in the Simple AO GPU tool.
The DX9 graphics driver now uses less VRAM to store the normal maps.
Corrected some minor bugs. |
 |
|
|
January 28, 2007. xNormal 3.14.1 released. |
|
Added a DX10 graphics driver with HDRI,
improved bloom effect and sightly better soft shadows.
Of course, DX10 runs only in Vista... so if you use WinXP this driver will be ignored.
I plan to make new graphics drivers with more advanced effects once OpenGL 3.1 is
available ( so you could execute it on Windows 2k/XP )... and perhaps I could improve
a bit the DX9 and OGL ones in the future.
These are some of the features of the new DX10 graphics driver: |
 |
 |
 |
|
Improved glow and HDR support |
Multisample antialiasing transparency support |
|
 |
|
By the way, i'm looking for a new example
showing all these new features... so if you wanna donate some scene I will be very
pleased, thx! |
|
Added an useful text information in
the 3D viewer: the maximum cage distance. You can measure better uniform ray distances
and height limits just going to the "edit cages" mode and looking at the text's
value.
The height map rendering no longer requires to enter manually the min/max ray length
in the options dialog. Now uses the cage as limit or the const uniform ray distances
on the highpoly mesh list. |
 |
|
Finally, solved some bugs ( including
a crash in the Simple AO GPU tool when loading files with more than one mesh inside
). |
|
|
|
January 18, 2007. xNormal 3.14.0 released. |
|
Added
Luxology Modo, Nevercenter Silo
and
Geomview mesh importers.
Also solved some bugs in the Ogre importer ( flipped UVs and tangent basis data ). |
 |
Solved several bugs in the PLY mesh importer.
The PLY, OBJ and ASE mesh importers now consume less memory. Used the Stanford's mesh
collection with 1,5Gb of RAM to test. The Lucy mesh ( 116M points, 40M polygons ) was loaded
without problems with that amount of memory.
The realtime ray tracing graphics driver has been optimized to manage big meshes
better. |
 |
Added per-vertex ambient occlusion computation in the simple GPU AO tool.
This is good because you don't need to UV-map the mesh... and can be used in the
traditional AO rendering to accelerate the highpoly-lowpoly projection a lot!
The 3D viewer was adapted to show the per-vertex-AO in both highres and lowpoly
mesh models.> |
 |
Changed completely the rendering system to make it more efficient and to consume
less RAM. Now uses a "bucket" approach.
Now is possible to render 4k x 4k maps with full antialiasing without problems.
The new adaptive sampling render system allows to generate the
maps faster when you enable antialiasing. A diagnostics option has been added to
see visually the sampling density.
Modified the preview window to show the realtime progress of the render. |
 |
|
To finish,
the maps baked don't use the alpha channel anymore. Now you can use "paste"
or to enter
manually a path in the file boxes.
Some bugs were corrected too. |
|
|
|
January 3, 2007. New tutorial. |
|
Added a new tutorial with a trick to use the 3.14.0's
Simple GPU AO tool to compute per-vertex occlusion and to render the traditional
highpoly-lowpoly projective ambient map faster.
In this tutorial you can see the basic functionality of this tool. You will need
Adobe's Flash Player to see it. |
|
|
|
December 2, 2007. Visits and downloads count. |
|
Weee! Today this page reached 3M visits and almost 1M downloads!
Thanks to all the people who downloaded the application and also to the contributors
who make xNormal better! |
 |
|
|
November 2, 2007. Blog. |
|
|
Just want to remind you that I usually put future plans and some comments in my
blog http://santyhammer.blogspot.com .
Feel free to visit it and read about the upcoming xNormal versions! |
 |
|
|
November 6, 2007. xNormal v3.12.0 released. |
|
|
Added PRT-p and PRT-n map rendering support for the upcoming game Wing Commander
Vega Strike .I want to thank Dan Watkins and Claudio Freire
for all their help with this new amazing GI technique! |
 |
Probably the most exciting changes
are these two:
A fully-GPU-accelerated ambient occlusion generator tool! Very simple to use and 100x faster
than the typical one. Its speed surprised me. Baked the smiley example at 1024x1024
and 128 samples in... less than one second! And all this with a cheap 70$ GeForce
8500!
Also added a cone mapping tool ( improved parallax effect ). I wanna thank Jonathan "lonesock" Dummer and Fabio Policarpo for their help. |
 |
I included an experimental 100% software
raytracing graphics driver.
It's still on "alpha" state... its performance is not very good but.. hey,
is a start! and is not at all optimized! I think is good also for the people without graphics card because is
able to run in 100% software mode ( it does not require OpenGL/D3D or any hardware ).
Did a new example to show the raytraced reflections. |
 |
|
Added 3dsmax 2008 support for the .SBM mesh exporter. |
 |
Also added a video recorder inside
the interactive 3D viewer. Just press F9 to toggle it.
You can save a video file with your mesh models while the camera is rotating,
you can record the normal mapping effect when light moves, to make demo reels easy, etc...
It's possible to select the video codec to use. I added the wonderful XViD MPEG4 encoder
to the xNormal install package... so you can select it to make nice demo reels. |
 |
Added an Ogre engine mesh importer/exporter
thanks to
Paul Cheyrou-Lagrèze and
Steve Streeting. Currently are in "alpha"
state but can read/write well the Ogre binary mesh format ( the XML one in a near
future... ).
The Ogre importer/exporter source code is provided in the xNormal SDK in case you want to expand it
or to collaborate on its development. |
 |
Corrected many OpenGL problems with the Radeon HD 2XXX cards ( white shadows, crashes, etc...)
Improved PLY compatibility ( now xNormal can read well the Standford's mesh collection
).
Added a new normal map - to - cavity map method: The EMBoss one ( I think it gives
very good results ). Also added a new method to compute height - to - occlusion
map.
Corrected tons of minor bugs ( including one related to AO computation that was
making it much more slow than should be! ) and polished some small details. |
 |
|
|
1
2
3
|