Improving Realism

Friends of tinySG,

over the last two months, tsgEdit finally got support for OpenGL multi-sampling. Together with using full scene antialiasing (fsaa) in software, image quality is improved significantly. Software antialiasing has hard-coded sample patterns for up to 63 samples. However, you may want to use the on idle feature (disables SW-FSAA during navigation) as it slows down the rendering performance by a factor of x when using x samples.

The second new feature is the support for cubemaps in tinySG, allowing for all kinds of interesting effects. The image (click to enlarge...) to the right uses a cubemap to easily create an environment for the Aston Martin DB9. The model is placed inside a large dome geometry and the cubemap is projected onto the inner surface of the dome. However, while adding much detail to the scene, the DB9 still looks somewhat misplaced. It does not yet interact with the environment and it's lighting conditions.

In order to increase the realism of a CG image, reflections and shadows are amongst the most important image properties. The left image below use the same environment cubemap to create reflections of the surroundings on the cars lacquer, rims and glass surfaces. Using OpenGL's texture combiners, tsgEdit controls the strength of the reflection and therefore provides a mix of regular lighting, OpenGL material, basic texture and reflection.

The images in this story are still rendered with the OpenGL 1.5 pipeline, not using any shaders. A logical next step would be to utilize the flexibility of tsgShaders to e.g. use a more complex lighting model, implement BRDF-like materials or add bumps or grains to surfaces.

DB9 with environment reflections DB9 in winter environment, with baked ground shadow

Having a shader-based effect library would boost the usability of tsgEdit. Imagine a set of shaders simulating various materials that just need to be dropped onto the scene tree to assign them to the geometry underneath. Materials could include glass, water, fur, leather, lacquer, carpet, additional effects could be glow, blur, depth of field, etc. The implementation notes for the new effects are already written, what is yet missing is some interface concept for artists and the time to implement them.

Stay tuned,
Christian

Acknowledgements:

The cubemaps used in this story are courtesy of Humus and kindly provided for non-commercial use.
The original DB9 model and texture images are courtesy of some unknown hero out there on the Internet.