Judith on 7/2/2008 at 22:46

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That's true, folks, you can create your own cubemap and use it as a reflection background for any material you want to set in Ion Shader! What does it mean for us, T3Eders? Basically, two things:

1. We can have fake, static reflections like in any other unreal 2.5, 2.x (and 3 too :p) engine, e.g. a puddle reflecting the sky, or a shiny metal surface where you can see the surroundings.

2. Having a properly designed cubemap and by editing the alpha channel of a diffuse texture we can set specularity of any surface we want! This lets us freely diversify the amount of reflection set in Ion Shader. Every pixel of a base (diffuse) texture can be set to "let the reflection through" or not, and to what extent. Yes, you can have a smooth transition between transparent and opaque part of a texsture, you can use brushes, airbrushes, gradients, etc. as long as they apply to a grayscale palette of alpha channel.

In case you don't know what cube mapping is and you'd like to know it's purpose: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_mapping) Here you'll see how it's being made for U 2.x engine: (http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/MaterialsEnvironmentMaps.html)

This thread is not about advancing any thesis, this is already proven, tested and written down, but not yet in a form of tutorial ;)

However, I managed to prepare a small presentation for you. As the whole subject is a bit complicated, it shows the results of my experiment with classic cubemaps only mentioned in point 1. The file is 14 mb, a one minute footage.

(http://www.sendspace.com/file/u9gtbu)

You can also preview it here, but as usual on such websites, the quality is quite awful :p

(http://media.putfile.com/TDS---cubemap-example-1)

Example shots:

(http://www.putfile.com/pic.php?img=7634725) http://img2.putfile.com/thumb/2/3717522014.jpg(http://www.putfile.com/pic.php?img=7634724) http://img2.putfile.com/thumb/2/3717522031.jpg

What you see here will be available as a demo, so you'll be able to freely explore this small location. Actually it's ready now, but I'd like to release it along with a tutorial. You should see it in a few days, I guess it will be in a separate thread.

The second demo will be a comparison between many different surfaces with cubemap used as a specular, along with another tutorial, and probably another preview a few days earlier. This may actually take some time, as there are many variables to have in mind. I'm still working on a proper method to produce more controllable results ;)

Judith on 7/2/2008 at 23:17

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In fact I did, trying to force max's specular on my textures :laff: The only thing I found working was material "tinting" i.e. changing the color of ambient or diffuse values. Even devs used that, try importing GENwindows.mlb to the max library and you'll see what I mean :)

A small addendum to the first post:

You probably can't see it it the footage, but this method supports both the cubemaps and normalmaps. The trick is to use DXT 3 compression or newer. I also prepared a reflection for a transparent texture, but was too lazy to find a script responsible for changing skin on the sphere :p

Flux on 8/2/2008 at 00:01

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I was trying to use a mix map on the diffuse channel, for one slot ion shader and for the other slot of the mix map, something else from 3dsmax. That could lead to some interesting possibilities, but I couldn't get that "material" load in the editor.

Judith on 8/2/2008 at 09:43

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No, you can create any texture you like, and make it reflect any environment you build :) Of course, you should probably do it when your map is almost finished, so you w won't have to change cubemaps after some rearrangements.

Beleg Cúthalion on 9/2/2008 at 13:04

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For not disturbing the tutorial thread itself: I looked at your demo and although Fraps was not running, I believe I noticed a framerate drop when getting near to the blue sphere. Did you encounter the same thing (and to which extend) or is it only me? I just had the idea of making a canal in my map (which was my plan in general), but now it seems like this could be an elegant way of using this cubemap (hehe...let's say, if I am through the other stuff I haven't understoof yet), even if the water would only reflect the canal walls and the sky maybe.