Light Probing system is here

A new massive update for WebGL Aton FrontEnd has been deployed.
The real-time lighting component – including GLSL vertex and fragment shaders – has been completely rewritten to feature a full light probing system, with advanced per-fragment effects.

The FrontEnd is now able to manage ambient occlusion mapsnormal-maps, specular-maps, fog and other information to correctly render different materials and lighting effects using a modern, per-fragment approach. Note LPs also contain an emission map, to consistently define light sources and also their shapes. Consistent rendering of normal maps required special attention regarding efficient computation with GLSL fragment derivatives (this will be explained in a separate post).

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Chrysippus Head with LP: left without normal maps, right with normal maps. 3D Model created by E. Demetrescu

You can interactively change lighting orientation by holding ALT key and moving the mouse around. Try it live with:

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Left with LP disabled, right with LP enabled. Click to open live demo and play with parameters
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Light Probing applied to multi-resolution terrain datasets. 3D terrains generated by ARIADNE Landscape Services

These new features also apply to terrain datasets and, generally speaking, to all multi-resolution 3D assets published through Aton… Have a look at this landscape generated using ARIADNE Landscape Service. Yes, that means new options will be added soon to terrain service for processing multiple maps (i.e. specular maps for lakes, rivers, etc.) for 3D terrain datasets published online.

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An Earth model with diffuse, normal and specular maps with unreal stars

More info and details will soon be published. Stay tuned.

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