Ventuz Forum

http://www.crydev.net/newspage.php?news=117407

pure directx...

unbelievable...

One can theoretically achieve that in Ventuz now... though it would be easier with some clever shader work. (there is a car paint shader out in the net from AMD that should give similar results) But there is nothing that isn't doable in DirectX 9.

he is not doing any realtime reflections as far as I can tell, mostly it is an excellent model with excellent textures (and Ambient Occlusion), some good lighting and a very well applied reflection/environment map. The shadows are just textures.

Some of the cars that Stereolize have done for Porsche or that 3Monkeys have done have been at this quality. Glare Technologies, the guys that do the shaders, have also done some stuff at this level...

Yes this is 100% doable in Ventuz right now. (And even better if you add the Glare Plugin for Depth of Field.) You don't need any special car paint shaders. Clever usage of aReflection Map, a Specular Map, some Bump/Noise and a B/W Ramp plus Ambient Occlusion will get you that look for sure.

what about realtime shadows?
GI?
phong shading?
glossy, reflection maps?
Show me a photorealistic render done with Ventuz.
Porsche interior Stereolize renders are flat for me.

I give up.

gabrielefx wrote:what about realtime shadows?
GI?
phong shading?
glossy, reflection maps?
Show me a photorealistic render done with Ventuz.
Porsche interior Stereolize renders are flat for me.

Okay, sitting in a hotel room, so I'll bite.

First of all, you posted an image of what you wanted to achieve - none of the things you mention above are used in that image. And we have answered that - you could create a quality equal to that image in Ventuz 2006.

So, let's look at what you are talking about now.

Realtime shadows - There are ways to do this in shaders, but I agree with you.

GI - GI is not possible in realtime right now (i.e. 60fps) True Global Illumination requires true raytracing which is computationally far too expensive. The only systems that can do raytracing at all in a semi-realtime environment are software like DeltaGen, VRed, Bunkspeed etc, by throwing ridiculous hardware at it- and they do not do true GI, nor do they achieve 60fps. Even raytracing software such as Vray or Mental Ray generally cheat and cut corners to do GI at tolerable offline rendering speeds. So what you are asking for is a way to fake GI in a realtime environment. Apart from the fact that this is not needed in 99.99% of Ventuz projects, there are several ways to achieve dynamic complex lighting and shadowing with shaders. Spherical harmonics, dynamic cube environment maps, screen space ambient occlusion, etc

Phong Shading - you can do phong shading in Ventuz - that is what the HLSL editor is for. We use Gouroud by default because it is faster, all Phong does differently as far as I am aware is use vertex normals for the highlights. With sufficient geometry resolution this is a non-issue, and you won't get the quality you want without that resolution anyhow - phong or no. But if you insist on Phong, there are several HLSL examples, it is essentially a cut and paste. Or, an excellent first shader to write in order to learn HLSL - there are several HLSL tutorials out there on how to do this.

Glossy reflection maps? Ventuz supports reflection maps, specular maps, etc. Gloss as reflections with microfacets - see the AMD shader I mentioned, or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1179 ... ed-surface - that is GLSL, but you can surely convert it to HLSL.

Your example, done without any custom shaders:



You will notice the answer to almost all of these questions is 'use shaders'. This is what that node is for. If you want photorealistic 3D - then you can do it. BUT, you need to know what you are doing and it is work. So, that I guess is more the issue. What you are asking for, I think, is a system that lets you achieve these effects without needing to understand them. That is certainly something we can look at, but that is different to saying the tool cannot do it.

I know that cryengine simulates global illumination. It isn't a montecarlo GI computed with Cuda or OpenCL.
I've tried it.
the cryengine material editor is the most impressive directx material builder I saw on a software, I don't know what does Unreal 4.
For example In Unreal 4 we can insert ies lights for realistic illumination of closed spaces.
In cryengine we can insert lights, move them and see realtime shadows. Multiple lights=multiple shadows at 60fps.
Ventuz uses the same approach but to achieve semi-photorealistic results we have to write our own shaders.
I understand that we can buy Glare shaders but Ventuz should focus on photo-realism too.
Add many more shaders, shadows on-off switch, possibility to add hdr backgrounds without convert them. The algorithm will compute the right diffuse illumination.
Add an ambient occlusion shader and not a trick of stacked nodes to create a not so good effect.
Add a fresnel effect shader to simulate silk.
I tried Glare shaders but sometime we have to follow a pipeline to create the right effects, these shaders are not integrated into the Ventuz 4 core.
I don't know anything about programming and I don't want to do thousands of experiments to achieve an effect.
I can expand my knowledge on how create simple C# scripts or understand the Ventuz 4 features but the rendering engine is the same of what I saw in Ventuz 2006, is not changed.
I know you can do better and better.

regards