Anisotropic lighting

A coworker (Inigo Quilez) suggested that i use anisotropic lighting to simulate metallic surfaces on the space station. To my surprise, it works pretty well! It is also much more efficient than Cook-Torrance lighting, as it only requires to compute N.L and N.H, and to perform a texture lookup with these two coordinates. The lookup texture includes a small "diffraction" effect, which make rainbow colors appear. It is too strong now ( it should be subtle ), but it really gives a nice touch to the station. When seen in real-time, the anisotropic lighting is very nice, making distortions similar to caustics ( but more coherent and only viewpoint dependant )..

I've also implemented per-texture ambient occlusion ( as opposed to per vertex, which was limited by the tesselation quality ), and used 3ds max's render to texture feature to generate the textures. The ASE importer tool now supports multiple sets of texture coordinates, as i needed two ( one for the diffuse coords, one for the ambient occlusion coords ). I guess this could be used for lightmapping, too. Unfortunately, with all the textures and effects going on, ambient occlusion ( even per texture ) is almost invisible.

Mandatory screens of the station with anisotropic lighting:







If somebody still says that the station looks like plastic, i'll make myself a monk and go loose myself in the desert.