Phong-Shading vs. PerPixel-Lightning vs. Gouraud-Shading

[DJSnow]

Does anyone know any good way for realizing a better lightning-algorythm than the orig. grouraud-shading, support by OpenGL ?
I´like to use phong- or perpixel-lightning, but until now i don´t have found any good explanation for coding this. All stuff i found was mostly unreadable and ver slow !
If anyone has a sourcecode for one of these algorythms, please send it to me !

DjSnow

[cass]

Can you be specific about what techniques for per-pixel lighting you've tried, and where you've found information so far?

What specifically are you trying to do, and how slow is "ver slow"? :-)

[MikeC]

On current consumer hardware, if you want per-pixel lighting at interactive frame rates then you have to use lightmaps - precalculated luminance textures that are blended onto your polys. This is how Quake etc do it; it's pretty fast with multitexture hardware. But having to pregenerate the maps is a bit cheesy.

Still, changes are afoot - the PixelFusion boards due out this year will support realtime programmable per-pixel shading models including Phong and Torrance-Sparrow. I think it'll be priced for the pro market initially, but should come down rapidly.

I believe there are cards already out there that can do dot-product per pixel, but I couldn't tell you what the performance or interfaces are like.

[paolom]

I tried some kind of specular hilight simulation, by applying a texture with sphere mapped coordinates generation.
The result is very nice, and the overhead is recalculating the highlight each time you move the affected light source.
By having an hilight map, you can use multitexturing to gain optimal performance.
I found this tecnique described in the SIGGRAPH course notes of... maybe 96-97?

[coco]

Check out this link. This is the most amazing dynamic lighting algor I have seen in current consumer hardware: http://www.opengl.org/News/Special/o.../perpixel.html

[Hec]

Also check these pages
http://www.pseudonymz.demon.co.uk/genoth.html

i Found it today on the OpenGL news called
"Supposedly useful stuff for OpenGL Game Developers"

[DJSnow]

Yes, Coco, i saw this article - but there is no source included. And i saw the same "technique" in an NVIDIA-developer demo.
The objects looks like the same, too !
I think, the man, who posted this articel to opengl.org ripped it off the NVidia-demos.

[cass]

Yes, Coco, i saw this article - but there is no source included. And i saw the same
"technique" in an NVIDIA-developer demo.

What you saw in the NVIDIA-developer demo requires a GeForce. The demo I did does not require a GeForce, but it takes 26 passes to achieve its results.

The objects looks like the same, too !
I think, the man, who posted this articel to opengl.org ripped it off the NVidia-demos.

It's SUPPOSED to look like the nvidia GeForce demo for the very purpose of illustrating that you can do (actually approximate) per-pixel lighting WITHOUT special OpenGL extensions. If you don't have the fill-rate to support 26 passes, though, it's gonna crawl. The look of the demo may be "ripped off", but the technique implementing it is certainly not.

Look at the source for the OIM article that is referenced if you want to understand one way of doing per-pixel lighting in unextended opengl. The technique in the demo is an extension and generalization of that technique.

[DJSnow]

Cass: uh, sorry ! thanx for this "lightning"

[mike j]

hey Cass where is the original article..
Orthogonal Illumination Mapping (OIM)

the link on the page Coco mentioned is dead