Quote: "What's "Sin Blur" can't find anything on it on google.
Is that faster than normal blurring? "
It's just a blur modifier based on your depth cue.
I should've probably called it Radial Blur, but wasn't really thinking of the technical name.
It isn't faster, but if you properly integrate it... it means you don't have to take several look-up's for better quality. As such it's what I use for much better Pixel Shader 1.4/2.0 Field of Depth.
Quote: "How did you make them self shadow if they're just prerendered images?"
Well this is all down to the setup I did.
Imagine you have model, and render out 8 Images of it turning around on the spot. You would effectively get Wolfenstien3D's Sprite effect, where it tries to mock 3D with Pre-Fabricated Images.
The technique used here, is the same.. just taken to a whole scary new level. Rather than simply outputing 8 turn around images, I output 8x8x8 Images; thus getting a semi-3D sprite you could rotate around.
But then I figured, if I did that for all the animations as well, the filesize would be HUGE!
So I came up with the idea, of exporting each limb like that. I could render them as smaller images.
So now I had 3D Sprites of each limb of a Doom3 monster. In order to animate it, what I did was created a skeleton on which I'd attach each 3D Sprite and use it as the pivot points for those given limbs. The Skeletons were made up of only a few parts, which could be pure numerical values.
I had my relatively small 3D Sprites, and a relatively small system for Animating them. (it also came in handy later for Physics!)
Once everything was done, all I had to do is setup the engine to allow it to process which particular 3D Sprite Frame would be visible at a given angle.
Instantly I had Psuedo3D Doom3 Monsters running around. The best part of it was, the planes for them were infact 3D. This ment I could calculate volume shadows if I made sure to take into account the alpha of the limbs. That however was too costly.. So the next logical step was to use a Projected Shadow, this worked a treat. I could shadow the planes.
Problem with this shadowing though, is the planes themselves are still flat. Thus exporting the Normal maps for the given 3D Sprites.
By adding the normal layer, I could give the Sprites DEPTH! On top of this, using a Shader I could use it's own depth from the Normal map to create the self-shadowing, just like I would for any 3D Mesh.
While I'm not sure how well all of the Shaders would work in DBP using pure code.. using Hardware Shaders, there is just so much you can do with a Diffuse Map and Normal Map.
The added bonus of the planes for the 3D Sprites actually being in 3D provided me with the additional benifits of depth cues
Doing it all through Shaders ment I could simply plus in lights as Vectors
The actual program is on another Hard Disk, so I'll dig it out and show a screenshot of the end result. It was a very interesting experience to do. Further more, my way of doing the normal mapping was unfortunately though Shaders.. which isn't quite as fast as doing it through the FixxedFunction Pipeline, but DBP lacks the abilities to Dot3 Bump Map natively. (Blend Mapping 23 is what is needed, but you can't multi-texture or set the light Delta making it useless)
