Week 3 - Lighting

This week we learned about lighting and the effects it can have on video games. 

Currently in our game we only have the simple OpenGL lighting implemented. We do plan on adding better lighting and shadows to our game and what we learned this week will help us do that .

Dr.Hogue talked about the importance of light in video games. Lighting creates mood and emotion, it can also make things look more realistic. 

Another important thing to note is that lighting is additive and is made up of 4 different components; emissive light, diffuse light, specular light, and ambient light.

emissive: Self-illumination which equally radiates in all directions from a surface.

diffuse: Reflection of light from a surface

specular: Bright highlight on an object caused by direct reflection

ambient: Light that affects all objects in a scene equally.


Dr.Hogue also showed us some of the shader code required to do these lighting techniques. I was surprised at how little code is actually required to compute lighting which seems so complicated.


Finally we looked at toon shading. I really like toon shading and I didn't think it was as simple as Dr.Hogue showed us. Toon shading is done by taking the max dot product of N and L and that value is used to determine what amount of light or what colour the pixel is. The results can be really beautiful.

In terms of the progress of our game we are currently working on modifying our model loader to use vbo's and vao's. After this is complete we can start working on creating some really cool lighting and shader effects to make our game look awesome. 

- Mark Henry 

Week 1 - Prelude

Thoughts

     This week we learned an introduction to shaders. Last semester we learned a bit about shaders, but we basically coded extremely simple shaders that, for example, change the colour of a square. There are two types of shaders, pixel shaders and fragment shaders. After seeing examples of what can be done with shaders like bump mapping and normal mapping, I'm really excited to improve our game from last semester.

Future Plans

     One thing I think we should do to improve our game is lower the poly count of our models and make them look nice with shaders instead of insane amounts of geometry. Currently our models consist of a lot of geometry, especially the character models. It hasn't been a problem since our game was just a prototype and not much was going on. Since this semester we plan on doing a lot more with our game, I think our engine will really benefit from lower poly models. I look forward to actually coding and implementing shaders.

Development Progress

Currently working implementing shaders into our existing framework.




- Mark Henry