MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Supermodel WIP Update: LeMans 24, Fighting Vipers 2, and Star Wars Trilogy

> Those aren't the graphical glitches that I was referring to but you bring up a good
> point. Supermodel is effectively performing flat shading right now. The renderer
> supports vertex normals, of course, but I don't know how to compute them. Model 3
> only stores polygon normals. In most situations, such as with inanimate objects, it's
> not noticeable, but on human figures, it is glaringly obvious.
>
> Here is a screenshot of Lost World from the actual machine, courtesy of Abelardo who
> has been supplying me with very useful videos of this game and Scud Race to compare
> against:
>
>
> Now compare with flat-shaded Supermodel:
>
>
> Ugly, right? It's been really bugging me. Using a slightly different way to compute
> lighting, similar to how specular lighting is usually done, I can do a little better:
>
>
> But still, the fundamental problem is missing information. A polygon normal is not
> sufficient. What if I search for all faces with the same vertex and interpolate the
> normals? The result looks perfect:
>
>
> The Le Mans girls will look perfect as well using this method and even the cars
> in-game start to look a lot nicer. Unfortunately, this calculation is O(n^2) in
> polygons, and is therefore unacceptably slow. I refuse to believe that the Model 3
> actually did this. But look how close it looks to the actual thing!
>
> Looking at polygon dumps, I don't see any per-vertex attributes that could control
> shading or sharing of polygon normals.
>
> It's a frustrating problem, to say the least.
>
> Ignore the FPS, by the way. I'm developing on an old laptop with integrated graphics.
> Supermodel seems to run full speed on any reasonable new hardware with a dedicated
> video card.

Sure, last pic seems far better

Can't you find anywhere in roms a sort of list with xyz coordinates, or just a list of unique numbers, followed by something that could be RVB colors information anywhere...? As each vertex on a 3d model can be listed as a list of coordinates, or just a number (vertex 1, vertex 2, etc..), with a color information, these informations can be stored elsewhere than in the model itself.. I know we used it when working at psygnosis, and usually we used a special plug in in 3ds max to vertex color the models, and these informations were exported with our plug elsewhere than in the exported 3ds model. One file had modelisation informations (xyz, maps, color of faces), the other had only vertex colors in.
I was graphist, not programer, but I hope my poor explanations in my poor english can help.

Regards

And again, congrats on the progress