Seriously, look at how shiny that dudes face is, it looks especially creepy on the floor. It's like you can almost see an entire galaxy in his face, or maybe just a nebula, I dunno.
Anyway, this assignment was fairly straight forward, just ran into a few bugs. Mainly fixing the camera to work how it was described in the email broke a few things. I believe the problem was resolved by negative a value. I'm not entirely sure why we needed to change anything, since from what I understood we were just passing in extra data that we didn't need originally.
Other than that the environment map worked just fine. DirectX has great support for it. I wonder, do people invent these technologies and then DirectX includes them in the next major release or how does that stuff work? I thought environment mapping was a fairly new thing, but we're still rocking DirectX9, which is almost 3 years old now. Then again, the teacher mentioned Shenmue 2 doing it and that was like 2002...
Moving onto the second part of the assignment. Making anything behind the first sphere wobble according to a tangent function. I dunno why we like tangents so much, probably cause of the asymptote that breaks up the squiggles. In order to do that we had to all the non transparent geometry, save that to a texture and then draw the transparent stuff using that texture as a background. Then copy it all back and actually draw it to the screen. Here's the screenshot showing the texture before the transparent entity in PIX.
I was having trouble figuring out where to place the draw copy it back code, because when I stuck it in my transparency if checks it never fired since none of the entities were technically marked as transparent. This led to a nice black screen, even though I could see all the stuff being rendered properly in PIX. Sherly helped me modify my if check so that I got everything but the floor, turns out I was now copying the texture over to the backbuffer, but was doing it twice so I overrode the floor with the second entity. It was kinda neat to see each draw call in PIX and watch the exact moment the floor went bye bye. Fixed that one with even more modifications to my if check.
Those were the only real problems, the actual graphics part of the assignment was pretty straightforward. Which is odd cause they are both pretty bizarre ideas. Reflecting something that isn't actually there has a surprisingly cool effect that is very noticeably different from just specular. I assume you would generally want the environment map to mirror whatever is in your skybox though. I was also blown away by how we achieve the squiggly ball affect. Literally saving the entire frame and then drawing over it seems like a ridiculous amount of extra work to do every single frame. That said, we are essentially doing that anything with each mesh being drawn on top of the previous one, but we're only drawing the fragments we need each time.
The teacher said we could only do it once or it'd get too slow, but I wonder if we could pull it off again considering how little we're actually doing in our scenes.
Anyway, source code!
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