After reconsidering the level design we settled on the more practical and beneficial approach to split up that massive terrain into a set of 5 ‘islands’, each of them themed, and, perhaps one for the community. Here are some basic level shots of the first island in blender. We’ll have some in-game screenshots posted soon. The ground textures are not splatted yet, just blocked in. You’ll hear more about this later, because there’s actually a lot of exciting information to share.

There’s also Mandy, the latest addition to the Apricot cast. Fur is something still to be worked out, so no texture for now. We have big plans for Mandy.

What can you do to make Happy Blender Institute much more happier ? You would order a cake for us ! 🙂 An Apricot cake. Today one person from Blender’s community surprised us with apricot and rise cakes ! Thanks a lot ! Really appreciate 🙂 What community can do for us except coffee machine and cakes and of course DVD-pre orders 🙂 ? Well.. we accepting also beer for example 😉

Hmm bazooka you say…

I’ll be at Libre Graphics Meeting in Wrocław/Poland (Thursday 08th May – Sunday 11th May). This is third edition of this event where people interested about free graphic tools like for example Gimp, Scribus, Krita, Inkscape and ofcourse Blender can meet together. You can expect Blender workshop also Apricot and Peach presentation.

Apricot presentation will be in Saturday 10th 15:30 – 16:15 room D-20 B, so don’t miss it ! But if you do – not a problem because we will show full report here too.
More info: LGM 2008 page.

If you want to help Apricot and are not afraid of Crystal Space, C++ code, and in particular Crystal Space’s C++ code – take a look at the Development page, I slightly expanded the Crystal Space section.

Lighting things is pretty well covered in Crystal Space* right now; multiple lights can be rendered in one pass, and materials can have the usual assortment of properties such as normal maps, specularity maps etc. giving shiny visuals. However, for a truly convincing environment you also need shadows.

Crystal Space actually supported stencil shadows for a while, but they’re not with out issues: the algorithm inherently can’t support any transparent textures, and extra care must be taken by the artists to produce “closed” models, otherwise the shadows will mess up. Also, the Crystal Space implementation has some issues: they need some effort to set up and animated meshes are not supported.

Thus I implemented shadow map support. Without going into too much technical details, they can support binary transparency (aka alpha test), don’t need special care for the models (just throw anything at them and it’ll look as it should), and due simpler implementation, they work on animated meshes in Crystal Space. Within the render manager framework they can easily be utilized by either using a stock render manager with shadow support or some lines of code in custom render managers.

Now some screenshots on how they look in that well-known small test level:

Shadows test, from a distance

  
Some close-ups

Shadows also work on somewhat larger levels:

(Ignore the missing textures etc. Focus on the shadows 😉

Some implementation details: Parallel-Split Shadow Maps on top of a plain normal shadow mapping. (You can see the shadow maps displayed for debugging purposes in the lower left corner of the shots.) The”soft” shadows you see are actually provided by the NVidia hardware – so real soft shadows is still something left to be done.

* Well, render manager branch.