[osg-users] OSG-based excavator simulator

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hi Ulrich,

> Maybe what Paul was asking about (and what I always like to learn from other people's
> setups) is:
>   are the different textures (normals/specular maps) and shader assignments all set up when
> you get them from your modeller?  Or do you have to do additional tweaking from within
> your program?

We currently don't use a 3D file format that allows for specifying 
normal maps and other types. Actually it does, but OSG doesn't read it 
so we'd need to do lots of work to extract the information anyways.

So no, we have our artists make models with diffuse textures, and make 
normal and specular maps and whatever else we want to make separately. 
We have config files that make the link between the nodes in the graph 
of the loaded 3D model, additional textures to load (the diffuse texture 
is already loaded as part of the original model) and shaders to apply. 
Most of the time a normal map / specular map is linked to a diffuse map 
(you'll have a diffuse map called "stone_wall.jpg" and a normal map 
called "stone_wall_normal.jpg" and both will use the same texture 
coordinates) so we also have a mode to do the association that way 
instead of explicitly by node name - we search through statesets to find 
the diffuse texture and do the association then.

This is very flexible, but unfortunately not artist-friendly, which I'll 
be working on improving soon. Our pipeline currently involves both 
artists and programmers to get those nice "advanced" effects (only ten 
years old or so in real time use ;-) ).

Given that shader effects are not standardized in OSG I think it would 
be hard to have it another way for now. OSG would really need to have 
its own shaders for all these effects, as well as an official tool or 
plugin to save the data in the right format out of the 3D content 
creation tool. Or specify that if you want these effects you need to use 
formats that support them, which I think for now is Collada and FBX 
only? Valve mdl too? They're not many anyways.

So essentially, if that were the case, OSG would be dictating how you 
use shaders in your app, and what your content creation pipeline is. I 
don't think that's OSG's place - at least not currently. An OSG-based 
engine can do that (which is basically what we're making for our 
simulators), but not OSG itself.

It's good that we get to do these demos as they give us ideas on what to 
improve in our process instead of just doing the same old thing over and 
over...

J-S
-- 
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay    jean-sebastien.guay at cm-labs.com
                                http://www.cm-labs.com/
                     http://whitestar02.dyndns-web.com/