The next major update to the graphics engine was to handle basic skeletal animation.  This required updates to both the graphics engine and the FBX conversion pipeline.  This was also the first model to use specular maps, so support for that also had to be built into the engine.  This initial specular mapping was actually wrong, but looked correct enough on models with small enough triangles that I didn’t notice the bug for a long (5 months!) time. Also, artists were very happy that I finally corrected the issue with my loadtime normals calculation undoing their work on smoothing groups.

This was also the birth of the scuttle, which despite not fitting the current theme of the game and never being intended as an actual game asset was beloved by the team and our game instructors and is still in the game to this day because of it.  A lot of people also feel a real need to kill it.  It’s kind of a 50/50 split.

This image was taken on 9/17/12.

Not a huge improvement here, but what do you expect in a day?  Got a new box model from the artists and I learned the incredibly cheap trick of setting a base global ambient value to simulate some of the effects of a global illumination system within a local illumination system.  As basic a trick as it is, it’s still very effective.

This image was taken on 9/8/12.

This wasn’t much of an update from the previous post.  In fact, it was even taken on the same day.  After getting the basic lighting and normal mapping in, I looked at the asset loading pipeline and reworked it to easily allow the loading of different models at once.  A simple task, but one which I hadn’t really considered carefully enough during my initial system design.  A small refactor later and everything was ok.

This image was taken on 9/7/12.

With summer school over, I took a small break from doing anything to recharge.  I’m usually pretty unrelenting about working, but sophomore year had been especially draining.  After that break, I got started on implementing a basic Phong based lighting model.

The two major improvements here are a single directional light used for illumination and normal mapping on the skull model.  The illumination uses no global ambient to prevent the scene from being nearly pitch black, which makes for a really excellent screen capture.  Also, the process by which I read in normals from the mesh file was undoing the work the artists had done in applying smoothing groups to the model, thus the incredibly blocky nature displayed here.  For as much of a step forward as this was, it was also a very primitive step.

This image was taken on 9/7/12.

There’s not really any updates on the graphics side of things in these images (of which there are 3!).  Instead, this was the first run of converting assets made by artists and rendering them in game.  A pretty important test since I was likely not making assets in the most correct way with my impressive 3D modelling skills.  There are 3 images here because the artist that made them (Ian Hampton) was unhappy with the angles I was taking the screen captures from.  He wasn’t happy with any of these, but I had to get back to work.

These images were taken on 8/15/12.