An early technical demonstration of the new shader pipeline (NWN:EE). Feedback is welcomed!
JuliusBorisov
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Those two are from 7 images posted at the Vault website, linked in Julius' top post. All images have descriptions if you hover over them, that tell what is being showcased.
-JFK
edited to note that all the images show changes only to shaders/material maps. No changes to the shapes of models. So the plaster one shows how the look of depth between the beams and the plaster can be achieved, without increasing the polycount or changing the actual geometry of the model. Pretty awesome!
Here's a couple corresponding shots without the shaders and textures.
-JFK
Unbelievable how a 2d potatoemash texture can look so great.
Keep up that great work guys! And don't rush ... done when it's truely done.
Will there be ceilings?
I want it. ?
The info from the OP is much newer.
As for modding some people have made some use of it already but I don't think there's a fully fleshed out official documentation yet.
However, I think in terms of hooking in new users and keeping them playing the game desperately needs improvements to character models / faces / textures.
The environment looks better than the characters in these screenshots. In general, you want the reverse to be true (particularly for a roleplaying game).
Or bringing back old ones. I played a bit after release but the dated look kept me from getting hooked again. After seeing the enhanced Hall of Justice I'm excited to see the entire game looking like that.
Still checking forums every day waiting for the "real" enhanced edition to begin, whether its a glorious expansion or just evolved assets for Aurora toolset.
Really hoping this is due to your "dated" specs... I thought this was supposed to improve performance? EE already has a huge FPS drop since 1.69/diamond when there's lots of spells and enemies on screen in PWs. And i have a nice video card, can handle much newer games than nwn...
I have found a fully public domain resource for textures. These textures all have specular, normal and diffuse parts. The thing is that some of them also have height and glow information. But they are not separate image files. Instead the unused alpha channels of the normal and specular maps are utilised. The normal has the greyscale height and the specular has the glow. I believe this is done this way so that these textures are unity compliant.
The question is can the new engine/shaders/material/whatever handle these correctly? If not these really good looking textures will go to waste or is there some way of automatically extracting this information and converting them for the new scheme (Bimp?).
One other thing. Are emissive maps the same as glow maps?
Thanks in advance.
TR
Hey there!
To answer your last question first, emissive maps are (in this context) indeed the same as glow/illumination maps. Beware however that the variant in the current tech demo only use 1 channel ("grayscale"), so if your emmisive map is coloured, make sure to grayscale/desaturate it first.
The same may be the case for the specular maps you've found - that is, they need to be converted to 1 grayscale if they are coloured.
If you have textures that have height and/or glow embedded in other channels, you can use Gimp's Decompose command to extract the channel into a separate image. There's a guide available here: https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/plug-in-decompose-registered.html
I hope this answers your questions, otherwise let me know