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Morphcity v1.0 : demo for the Blitz3dfr Challenge N°3

admin — Sat, 25 Dec 2004 02:53:22 +0000

v1.1 : Upon requests from the Blitz3dfr users, I’ve made a shorter path
and I’ve changed the camera range.

## Morph City Demo v1.1 ##

I’m
proud to release a demo made for the
Blitz3dfr.com challenge N°3, launch by Filax.

The main demo limit
was to fit in 8Mb.

This demo features state of the art graphics, and its theme is Morphing. Morphing with 3d fonts, Metaballs, and Morph of a character from Orc to Human. The demo take place in a city with rain, lightning, hi-quality sound fx, music and more… Note : the Orc is totally naked! This is why this demo needs parental advisory.

You can download the >>demo FREE here.<<

Minimum requirements :

P III or better, ADM Athlon .
Directx 7 compatible video card with 128 Mb of RAM.
512 Mb of RAM

Usage :

Just download the Morphcity.exe and click to see the demo.

Some function keys:

F9 : save a screenshot
F10 : change to free mode. In this mode, you control the mouse and you can visit the city as you which.
F11 : go back to demo mode from the free mode.
3 : if you press this key on the main keyboard you’ll launch a lightning about 500m away around the camera.
ESC : stop the demo.

More tests with water

admin — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 02:50:48 +0000

I’ve re-worked the water. I’ve added refraction, depth of sea and various options that get me very close to a realistic water. It takes about the same time as a regular cubemapping, but the result is much better. Here are some pictures.

Raytracing on the GPU

admin — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 22:47:10 +0000

It is amazing what we can do with the GPU! Using Pixel Shaders I display some basic Sphere, in real time. I remember a time where it was taking 20 minutes with Povray do just calculate one frame!

First test with water

admin — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 02:50:28 +0000

I’ve programmed the water : animation, caustics, reflexions, and an optimized cube mapping, faked cubemapping options. Also when you go undersea, and have a very realistic real time screen deformation and the reflections on the water swaps as well. You can change the caustics contrast, color, blending. The 3 levels of textures (optional) and reflections can be blended together. An option can make the textures seamless automatically. bluring (soft and hard) can be applied automatically at the textures load time. The 2 technics used for doing the cube mapping (and minimize the CPU use) are as follow :

1 – accurate : each side of the cube is rendered in a different frame, and step every 2 frames (one frame calculate 1 face second frame do nothing).

2- faked : the cubemap is created at the program start and has only the skydome texture, no objects and terrain reflexions can be processed.

With the method 1, I get 24 FPS with my FX5200, with the faked one it jumps to 37 FPS. (about 20 000 poly and 30 objects). Without these optimization the frame rate was about 7-9 FPS.

Check the pictures to have more info. Note in these pictures the shadows have been removed and the lens flare as well.

Lens Flares added to the gamesystem

admin — Sat, 11 Sep 2004 02:45:54 +0000

I’ve added a total Lens Flare and sun simulation with collision to the Engine. I’ve renamed the engine : Gamesys.

Features include real time lens Flare creation and modification,
placement in the sky over the skydome, collision and hide behind par of
the landscape or even windows in meshes. Load, save lens Flares. Lens
Flare settings are also saved in the TED map.

Volumetric fog

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 22:16:40 +0000

I’ve also changed the Skybox with a SkySphere that is in my
opinion much better. Here is the result.

I’ve added the volumetric fog in the Camera dialog. You can control the
color of the fog, its height, transparency, the wind/smoke animation
speed, the texture scale

When you get closer to the fog, the overall fog parameters are changing
to emulate a real fog density.

At the time you enter into the fog, you have some trouble to see
anything.

When you are under the fog you stillhave a lot of fog, the sky is
darker, but you can see the closest objects.

Now we go out from the fog!

Grass into TerraED

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 22:00:59 +0000

TerraEd Grass

I’ve integrated Blitzgrass to TerraEd. It took me about 2 days. A small picture of the Grass editor v1

With this first version, you can control the Grass, color type, transparency, size, the number of grass to add, remove all grass, the lowest and highest point where to place grass.

You can also select with check boxes which grass to add, or change. So it is easy to add water grass around the water for example.

Click on the picture to see the 1280×1024 original picture.