3 days ago I started working on a hex tile engine for my next project. I wasn’t really going to bother sharing much until I was much further into the project but I couldn’t resist sharing the work I did today on baked Ambient Occlusion. The idea has been in my head for a few nights so today I sat down and bashed it out… the boxel mesh has a 2nd set of texture coords that are generated to work with an atlas of pre-baked ambient occlusion tiles. Its not perfect but its super fast since its only a texture lookup. There is still room for some improvements on the atlas which would smooth out the overall effect… I missed a couple of permutations =/.
I’m a spastic when it comes to video recording and encoding, so HD video’s were just not going to happen for me tonight. I uploaded a super muddy video of the lighting deconstruction, please don’t pay too much attention to the horrible placeholder textures, the video it’s more about the lighting specifically the AO:
and here are some 720p screenshots showing the same thing:
everything on (1 ambient light + shadows + ao + 1 directional light):
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao01.png
ao off:
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao02.png
1 ambient light only:
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao03.png
1 ambient light + shadows
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao04.png
1 ambient light + ao
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao05.png
1 ambient light + shadows + ao
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao06.png
1 ambient light + shadows + ao + 1 directional light
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao07.png
Cheers
James
