I was wondering whether the inclusion of the OGRE plugin is more than just a performance upgrade for the game engine.
See, I’ve looked at some demos for what the ORGE engine can do (HDR lighting, water refraction, caustic effects like motion blur) and I am hoping that the higher-ups in the Blender development teams have found a way to add these capabilities to Blender.
See, having a game engine run off some pretty effects is all well and good when you’ve got the software to make them.
So will Blender be able to do this? Or can it already?
It might be able to do that in the future, but not now. There was a blenderbuild sometime ago which has now disappeared. It had realtime shadows (even though people have made things like that into GPL Quake 1 engine) but the shadows were nice. But if you really need some better realtime graphics, you could try blender 2 crystal.
Sigh… I wish first OGRE blenderbuild would come out soon…
HDR lighting is a simple calculation that just needs to be turned on. It is already part of Ogre.
I hope that with certain lights this is all automatic … like perhaps if we use a sun or a HEMI it will enable the HDR effects. or perhaps just a property assigned to any lamp.
There is a different way I would like to see, and that is with HDRI… I want to be able to use a light probe image for me scenes Global Illumination… It would also be nice if it overrides the Cube maps for reflections, if no cube map is specified by the shader, it falls back to the GI light probe image.
If that is not so easy, then perhaps IBL that we can use any photo with (somewhat like the new Panda 3d build, only I want a working one ).
Well… that is my lighting wishlist for now…
If you need HDR right away, there is an Ogre plug in, and I be t a tutorial on the ogre site.
If Ogre is too complex, You can use Crystal space…
Crystal space has some really cool effects for lighting, and you do it all in the blender!!!
Right now I am experimenting with Panda 3d… I will get back to you guys on the lighting tweaks I find there as well
Ogre has probably the best material system I’ve seen, with many different blending effects, multiple layers, and of course fully programmable shaders I think the ogre port to blender will support these as well (I don’t see how you could port ogre without the materials anyway).
A lot of this will depend on the render target support. For example, the HDR rendering requires rendering the scene to an off-screen render target, then render a plane with that as a texture with a tone mapping shader. The shader aspects will be there - it’s the render target bit that might be a problem. Anyone able to shed some light on this? (snailrose?)
Here’s hoping!
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