Geometry and Texture Rendering

This week I finished the geometry and the texture rendering part of my engine. It loads Lightwave object files and uses vertex buffer objects and normal mapping for rendering. The GLSL shaders calculate specular highlights and use ambient occlusion maps I bake in Lightwave 3D.

First I also wanted to implement parallax mapping. But the problem with the visible seams around UV chunks entailed too much work on UV mapping. I want to be able to create meshes with color textures, normal maps, specular maps and ambient occlusion maps in Lightwave 3D and 3D-Coat (the former 3D-Brush) as fast as possible and without too many constraints.

For simple normal mapping I solved the seams problem more or less. If the normal of a fragment in tangent space is undisturbed (0.0, 0.0, 1.0), it gets only phong shading. For this I don't need tangent space calculations and can just use the averaged normals. As a result, if the tangent space normals in the UV border region are undisturbed, there is no seam visible.

One could have solved the seams problem with Nvidias Mesh Mender. But because I create this engine on my own, I didn't want to spend more time on this.

Now I'm working on a shadow map. After that I want want to look into post processing shaders and implement at least a bloom shader.