get scribbling, n00b

Holy crap dude, you bet I'll buy the book.

Quote:Original post by jamesw
you bet I'll buy the book.

Thats what I like to hear [grin]

Cheers,
Jack

Quote:Original post by jamesw
Holy crap dude, you bet I'll buy the book.

Hell yes!

Since I'm a beginner in so many things, I need to suck up as much knowledge as possible. From the looks of your book, it should provide me with enough knowledge for 6-8 months.

Can I buy it with MVP bucks? :)

Heya!

First off, thanks for moderating the DirectX forum, always appreciate the responses. I'll certainly be buying your book when it's published!

A few questions about the book:

What PS spec are you writing it to, 3.0? 4.0?
Are you going to cover Geometry Shaders at all?
Are you going to cover any of the relief mapping optimizations, like Cone-Step mapping?

And one last comment:

Your last self-shadowing relief mapping looks a little strange. While I believe the ray-tracing looks like it is calculating the shadows correctly, it seems like it's replacing the shadowed pixels with a flat gray color. Of course, I'm on a laptop in a bright room, so I may just not have the contrast to see the shadowed/shaded pixels correctly.

Either way, keep up the good work!

Quote:Can I buy it with MVP bucks?

heh, would be nice if we could get other books with those wouldn't it! [smile]

Quote:What PS spec are you writing it to, 3.0? 4.0?

Purely SM4 as that is the only model exposed for Direct3D 10.

Quote:Are you going to cover Geometry Shaders at all?

The book does cover the GS, but my particular section doesn't use it much - there aren't that many opportunities for it with conventional lighting models.

Quote:Are you going to cover any of the relief mapping optimizations, like Cone-Step mapping?

No, not really. I simply didn't have the time or page-count to fit everything in. I've provided a basic POM/RM implementation with a few notes on how to extend it (e.g. Tartarchuk's soft shadowing technique in the ATI sample)

Quote:it seems like it's replacing the shadowed pixels with a flat gray color.

You are correct in your observation! The main evaluation returns a value between 0.0 and 1.0 as you'd expect, but the final part of the PS adds an ambient term of 0.25, which is most obvious in the shadowed areas. No particular reason for this - just thought it looked better [smile]

Cheers,
Jack

You know, this is just me thinking out loud here, but if an artist went up to me and said that he'd like to basically make the 3rd image there using pixel shader raytracing as opposed to just doing some extra geometry+parallax mapping, I think I'd PROBABLY kick him in the nuts.


THE ALIASING! MY EYES; THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!

Glad I'm not an artist working with you then [lol]

It would be interesting to run a full analysis of brute force geometry, proper displacement mapping and POM/RM - see if there really is that much advantage to using tricks over genuinely creating the geometry...

Jack

I seem to recall we discussed this before, but I'd guess the main advantage of using POM (or the like) over regular geometry is scalability as it helps reduce the art requirements (both in dev time and memory-wise). You can use the same geometry for all target platforms, ranging from shoddy per-vertex lighting for low-end platforms, to normal mapping, to POM by throwing some relatively simple textures into the mix.

Does that somewhat intelligent reply in any way warrant an evaluation copy of your book? ;)