Comments on: Separate Specular Hilites and Per-Pixel Lighting https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/ Developer resources for the X-Plane flight simulator Tue, 01 Feb 2011 02:17:04 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 By: Anonymous https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-781 Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:38:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-781 Looks really nice development. Great work Ben!

Unfortunetely I can’t seem to get it working. I’ve tried beta3 and 4. In rendering setting I have Pixel shaders turned on. Yet no extra shininess and no realistic shadows gained. 🙁

I have Geforce 8800 GT 512 Mb (2.0 Nvidia-1.5.36) on MacPro 2.8GHz Quad-core, MacOSX 10.5.6. All Apple system updates are applied. Is my GF 8800 already obsolete or am I missing something here?

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers
Ari

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By: Anthony https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-782 Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:48:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-782 i think the beta spec is much better than the 9.22, although metal material specular takes on the colour of the diffuse colour, so the older system should in theory be better. However most planes are painted with paint that is only slightly metallic and as sun light reflection is extremely bright it usually ends up burning out to white even on dark metal surfaces.

I know you have mentioned on this blog before to maybe move to high dynamic range lighting system which would improve the tinted specular hugely. Have you ever tried to implement environment maps in X-Plane? I don’t mean a live lookup like the water, but just a static 360 image (i suppose it would have to change through a few different ones based on some presets of weather and time) along with a bit of fresnel effect it would really add more interesting shading, especially when the aircraft isn’t directly lit by sunlight

The mention in an earlier comment of normal maps i find an exciting prospect too, I can certainly imagine a plane with separate maps for spec and normals being quite amazing looking, add an environment map and we really could be seeing photorealistic aircraft. (assuming there are enough people making aircraft who have the skills to generate a good normal map)

I know all this is a massive job to implement and i expect its not a trivial impact on frame rate either.

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By: Benjamin Supnik https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-783 Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:54:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-783 DaveDuck – yes, in all approaches, including 922 and 930 as they are now, the author can turn shininess (that is, specular hilights off).

In plane-maker it is a boolean setting (“plane is shiny”) – in an OBJ it is an ATTRibute, with a ratio from 0 (not shiny) to 1.0 (max shiny, matching plane-maker).

cheers
ben

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By: AWC https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-784 Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:04:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-784 Ok, that does make sense,
thanks for the clarification

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By: Dave Duck https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-785 Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:29:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-785 I can’t tell from this post–in either approach, would an author have the option to turn “shiny” off entirely? I can think of some cases in which matte might be preferable (stealth aircraft come to mind).

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By: Benjamin Supnik https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-786 Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:54:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-786 I need to answer KRZ’s comment first for this to make any sense:

KRZ – yes, specular maps are coming…I am not sure what the precise format will be — tinting the specular hilight arbitrarily may not be an option. (For example, consider a normal map where the RGB channel is used for normal deflection.) But…at this point this is more like a 940 feature.

Another map layer for OBJs gets us closer to a more formal “materials” model, which is pretty non-trivial.

AWC: I would say that both options are not quite equal. (Remember that I am thinking long term here, when we _do_ have per-pixel gloss control via a gloss map.)

– Separate specular is definitely useful!

– Non-separate specular I think is only useful for compatibility purposes.

So I would only want to provide the option _if_ we have a compatibility problem here.

If there isn’t a compatibility issue (e.g. in general most people can live with having their models be “relit” by the new separate lighting scheme) then avoiding the option and having only separate specular means one less combinatorial option in the material model in the long term.

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By: Anonymous https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-787 Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:02:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-787 Nice post! And we love when you post images to describe new features, it’s really nice!

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By: krz https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-788 Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:26:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-788 specularmaps 🙂 giving control to the plane builder,…not only about surface-roughness (by intensity) but also about the kind of material (plastics have highlights showing the color of the lightsource (sun), while metals tint highlights with their own base-color. all this could be achieved with a texture. the intensity of the pixel on this texture would give the intensity of the highlight and the color of the pixel could be multiplied with the lightsource to tint the highlight for interesting (metal-like) results.

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By: AWC https:/2009/02/separate-specular-hilites-and-per-pixel-lighting/#comment-789 Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:10:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=235#comment-789 I think the selectable option would the way to go,just to give more options.

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