When do I get a good enough computer to play about with FBO's GLSL and stuff

Hey, my 12" PowerBook is *barely* a good computer. 1.3ghz g4, and a Gf 5200 Fx GO, the laughingstock of the industry.

I bought mine new for US $1600, you can probably get one second hand for less than a thousand.

I want a macbook pro so hard my teeth hurt.

TommorowPlusX Wrote:I want a macbook pro so hard my teeth hurt

Me too!

unknown Wrote:


Me too!

For the love of god, buy some more ram!

BTW, where did you get/how did you make the normal map? That has been my biggest concern so far. The specular reflection looks awesome, as does the distortion of the reflected and refracted scenes.

My current normalmap is taken directly from the executable for the water demo -- fortunately, Stuffit can unpack windows self-extracting executables.

I'm going to make my own, however, the same way I made my water texture. ( http://idevgames.com/forum/showthread.ph...627&page=4 )

I suppose the usual way to make normal maps is to create a height map and render it orthographically with three different light sources for each color channel.

Bah, there is no suitable filter in GIMP. And I'm too cheap to buy PS and too honest to steal it.

do it with OpenGL, or write a GIMP plugin?

I use the really crappy app "Normal Map Generator". http://homepage.mac.com/nilomarabese/Menu13.html

It's good in the sense that *yes* it works. It's crappy in that it only accepts and saves TIFFs, the gui makes it nearly impossible to select a POT output resolution, and so on. I might just write my own.

I just made a better normalmap this way and the water looks *so* much better. It's all about a good normalmap.

Yeah, I have that too. I was thinking just saving everything in a large resolution and scaling it down as necessary, since it's damn near impossible to get a power of 2 size with it. Of course, I first have to find a way to get even a height map for a descent water texture. *checks GIMP again*

akb825 Wrote:Yeah, I have that too. I was thinking just saving everything in a large resolution and scaling it down as necessary, since it's damn near impossible to get a power of 2 size with it. Of course, I first have to find a way to get even a height map for a descent water texture. *checks GIMP again*

What I do is this ( in photoshop, but GIMP might have rough equivalents ):

1) Run a perlin noise generator ( Filters->Render->Clouds )
2) Run the water ripples function on this ( Filters->Distort->Ocean Ripples... )
3) Duplicate the layer, invert it, set blending to 50% -- this will cause the layer to cancel the layer below, so you have solid grey.
4) Run a mild gaussian blur on the layer -- this essentially gives you a low-pass filter.
5) Offset ( with wrapping ) the image by half it's size in x & y, then use clone-stamp or some other technique to ensure the texture tiles.
6) Swizzle its levels to get a nice mapping from black to white
7) Run it through a heightmap-to-normal map app.
8) Optionally, run another gaussian blur on it to smooth out the rough artifacts the normal map app might have brought in.

I don't know if the ripple that I have is the same as your ocean ripple, but it looks pretty good. Thanks!

There is a gimp plugin somewhere, just you have to recompile gimp...

I'll post a link when I find it. Alternatively, I'll post the source to the plug in, if I find it on my hard drive..

Just out of curiosity, how does this image work as the normal map? (I'm assuming you could just do a drop-in replacement of your current normal map) In case your interested, here's the heightmap in case the normal map is too strong or weak) I can also do something similar to this for a normal map for heat distortions.

For the plugin, I tried to compile GTK to compile some plugins, but it required too many dependencies, one of which I believe was essentially GNOME. I just gave up, but have been able to do without.