Tutorial 15 Simple 2D
September 11th, 2010
In this tutorial, we’re going to render some 2D stuff. We will draw a rectangle and a 2D image. This can be really usefull when you’re going to make a menu for your game or application.
Tutorial 14 Simple text
September 10th, 2010
In this tutorial we’ll explain how to render text to the screen. This can be usefull to display debug information, but also to make a menu or console. What we’re going to try to do is render the all famous “hello world!” to our Truevision3D screen. For this, we created an all clean project again, to get rid of everything we’ve used so far, except for the TVEngine object.
Tutorial 13 Minimesh grass
September 10th, 2010
In this tutorial we will add some grass to the landscape. There was already some sort of grass-like texture on the landscape, but there were no real geometrical grass blades. When we add all of those blades to our scene, you can imagine it will be quite slow if we don’t optimize it, since there are a lot of polygons involved in this. Luckily for us, it has already been optimized for us in the engine, by something called minimeshes. This is a kind of instancing implementation for meshes, so only the position and rotation have to be send to the graphics card instead of all the vertices every time. Of course there are more optimizations, but I won’t go in depth with them now.
Welcome
September 6th, 2010
Welcome to my renewed website and blog. This website will of course still feature articles on the Truevision3D engine, but will get a lot of new content as well. In the next couple of weeks, expect new tutorials for truevision3d, as well as some super new content that i made at the 3D studio I’m [...]
Tutorial 12 Landscape splatting
September 5th, 2010
In this tutorial you’ll learn the basics of landscape splatting. Landscape splatting is best described as painting on the landscape. So you can have different textures on 1 landscape. In our tutorial we’ll use rock and grass. We’ll use rock as a base layer, and then we’ll apply grass only on the spots where the alpha value of a third texture is less than 1.
Tutorial 11 Landscape LOD
September 5th, 2010
What is landscape LOD? LOD is an abbreviation of Level Of Detail. This is a really cool performance trick. What does it do? Well, imagine having a scene with a lot of detailed objects. It’ll probably render slow, because it’ll have to always render everything that’s visible. But why would you care if there’s just a really small bump on a stone that’s like 100 or 200 meters away from you, you won’t be able to see it anyway. What if you could tell the engine that if an object is a certain distance away, it can make the object have less polygons, so it’ll render faster? That’s where LOD comes into play. It’ll give our landscape less polygons in the distance.
Tutorial 10 Simple landscape
September 5th, 2010
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to set up a basic landscape. Landscapes are great to easily get a large world without having to worry much about the performance cost. We’ll also introduce you to directional lighting, which is usefull on landscapes, since they’ll get lighted by the sun (or moon) most of the time anyway.
Tutorial 9 Water
September 5th, 2010
We’ve now used 2 of the effects of the TVGraphicsEffects class. But there are some other cool effects that we can use. The next effect is one of the coolest effects in my opinion, since I’ve always wanted to know how they make water in a 3D world. So we’re going to make a water surface with a cube spinning above the water, a floor beneath the water, and of course a sky (which you won’t see probably, but the effects are noticable).
Tutorial 8 Depth of field
September 5th, 2010
The glow effect we used is pretty cool, but we can make things even cooler. Of course every one knows what depth of field is. Maybe not by the term depth of field, but everyone must have seen it. If you make a picture with a lot of depth in it, you’ll probably see that the objects closer to the camera are blurred, as well as the objects far away. The objects at middle range are looking normal though. We’re going to make a similar effect. We can’t calculate how blurred every pixel would have to be, since that requires a lot of calculation power, so we’ll try to fake it. We’re faking it with the build in depth of field shader of TV. This shader has a couple of fixed amounts of blur. You can adjust the number of layers, but it always has a fixed amount of blur for each layer.
Tutorial 7 Glow effect
September 5th, 2010
We’ve got a pretty good animation up and running now. It looks pretty cool, but not half as good as the current new games. That’s why we’re going to add some cool looking effects. In this first of three tutorials we’re going to add a glow effect. This will make the bright spots stand out a bit more, because they fade out a little instead of making hard edges.
