New Tutorials Section Needs Your Help

[Jason]

Hi all,

I've been starting to flesh out a Tutorials section on the OdWiki. Enjoy, and if you can think of links to external tutorials, please write in this thread - or better yet, add them yourself

Thanks!

Jason

PS. So far there are no new tutorials on the page, I've just pointed to pre-existing ones.

[Visual Cortex Lab]

I've been always waiting for your "Writing shader" tutorials to be finished .. maybe this is a nice chance your cool job will go on?

nice section btw... clean and really usefull.

[Overload]

Yea full shader writing tutorials would be nice..... Mario? your the master

[Jason]

Well, quite frankly VOPs have made this process quite a bit easier. Things are really quite easy to do - expect for the really out-of-the-ordinary task which are pretty hard.

I'd think that now there are only some basic rules for how to build "realistic" surfaces: generic plastic surfaces (laquered e.g. pool balls and raw plastics), ceramics, metals and dielectrics (reflective&transmissive - e.g glass). Most of these are combined in a similar way and only compromise of a few simple VOPs.

After that, there's bump-mapping in the Surface or Displacement contexts, displacement mapping, most of which are simple and creative (with a couple of technical caveats/considerations).

So if you have a grasp of applying a Lighting Model and reflections with a fresnel rolloff (or pow()'ed Edge Falloff), you're basically armed with the technical knowledge you need to create most scenes you'll encounter. Combine this with displacement/bump-mapping for some lovely detail and you're away.

Here the creative task of lighting the scene takes over. I suppose some explanation and guidance on when and how to use Ambient Occlusion would be appropriate since this is now an utter necessity since rendering became so much more high level.