3D Decals

Excellent article. Soon, a greater percentage of the rendering time will be spent writing to the stencil buffer than to the color buffer.

I''ve not come across the idea of 3D decals before, and now that I''ve seen it, it''s a great idea. I can imagine using it for ''extrusive'' decals as well as the ''intrusive'' ones you described... imagine blowing a hole in some monster with a shotgun, and then seeing chunks of him spread out on the wall behind. Chunks that you can walk around the side of and look closely at.

Superpig
- saving pigs from untimely fates, and when he''s not doing that, runs The Binary Refinery.
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There is just one slight problem I can see with 3d decals. If you apply one to a wall then your going to be seeing inside a shape, this means that if you have a cube and put a hole in one of the faces you can look around inside the cube. This''d a. look bad and b. most of the time renderers perform back face culling. Aside from rendering a whole lot of triangles to form a cylindar for the bullet hole, does anybody know of a good way to fix this?

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Original post by RamboBones
There is just one slight problem I can see with 3d decals. If you apply one to a wall then your going to be seeing inside a shape, this means that if you have a cube and put a hole in one of the faces you can look around inside the cube. This''d a. look bad and b. most of the time renderers perform back face culling. Aside from rendering a whole lot of triangles to form a cylindar for the bullet hole, does anybody know of a good way to fix this?

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* <--- This article

O <--- Your head

Heya!

Correct me if I''m wrong... But I think I found this article as a .pdf about a year ago?? Even think it was gamedev.net that posted a link to it? But the last part seems "new".

Either way, the idea is very cool!

Maybe combining the thing with the ideas of a particle system. Say you have a decal pool of 500 (wow) decals, you can "splot" them around the scene. And when reaching 500 you take away the oldest ones, respawning them. Or if they become part of the actual scene as some kind of object the renderer knows what to do with. So that when you walk back to a place you go "oh yeah, hehe... I remember this".
Just curious how many of these decals would affect the overall frame rate

"No lies of sugar can sweeten the sournes of reality"

}+TITANIUM+{ A.K.A. DXnewbie[onMIRC]

I submitted this article to gamedev.net about 6 months ago, maybe more. I had no response from them for a few months, so I decided to just PDF it and put it up on my website. To my surprise, I found that they'd actually put it up yesterday.

Better late than never...

Anonymous Poster: To my knowledge, no-one has used 3D decals in any game before - as far as I know, I came up with the idea, but please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Hence, there aren't any in-game shots of 3D decals.

RamboBones: Read the article again - I don't think you've quite understood it. The hole is made, but then a 3D decal model is placed behind the hole, so you won't be seeing through the wall.

superpig: Well, you wouldn't actually need to do any stencil-buffer magic to do extrusive ones - just plop the model on top

[edited by - DeathWish on August 29, 2003 12:43:49 PM]

quote:

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Original post by DeathWish
RamboBones: Read the article again - I don't think you've quite understood it. The hole is made, but then a 3D decal model is placed behind the hole, so you won't be seeing through the wall.

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Ahh yes, my mistae . Sorry guys

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[edited by - RamboBones on August 29, 2003 7:17:18 PM]