Well guys after 3 days of tweeking, coding, and resurching (but mostly tweeking) I have come up with a kick ass HDR based shader for GLSL in blender. For you that dont know what HDR is go here http://www.debevec.org/RNL/
The demo is almost complete. The user can rotate the camera, and adjust exposure and contrast. The demo consists of 3 models from HalfLife 2, to show the shader at its best.
I also plan to include multiple lighting scenarios that the user may switch through.
I have talked to snailrose and I am pretty shure this will make it into the graphics demos.
Are you shure?!?! Im pretty possitive the models can be distributed as long as they are not sold. Valve supports the modding comunity, and help supply tools to extract their models.
And its not just cool. I dont think you are understanding what HDR is. the Halflife2 engine does not even have HDR! (unless you get the mod) And yet I have it right here in blender!!! HDR is a massive graphical enhancement.
yes, it’s illegal to distribute those models for free. Valve does support the modding comunity, but in order to play mods, you need to own a copy of hl2 in the first place don’t you?
Yea this was one of my biggest worries durring the creation of the shader. The major problem is that HDR does not work well with low quality models and texures. I am a great modeler and texrure artist, on the same level as the HL2 models, but I simply do not have time. But I guess I have no choice now do I?
Well time to pull out my sketch book and do some concept art
Shader is fast and not to complex. Any decent card with GLSL support should work fine. You do need your card to be able to have 3 texture multitexture. I am working on a image compression system that can lower that to 2 mabey even 1.
Well Until I can get a good model to use for the demo I will continue to perfect the shader.
I also made two videos that demo the shader in two different lighting environments. These show much more than what the pictures can give, as I am changing various paramaters in realtime to change the effect.
If you are unsure about using the half life 2 models. Then send valve an e-mail and ask for permission, that you wish to use there models as a test demo to show of HDR in Blender.
Downloading videos now. Looks amazing the screenshots.
i can help u just tell me what kind of textues (size and color, diff, normalmap etc) u need.
and what kind of model (car, caracter, building etc) and polycount.
