The Lightblow shader is an improved Lighting shader for JME.
Features:
1 Improved lighting calculations.
2 Improved reflection calculations.
3 Reflection map implementation with normal map alpha.
4 Improved Minnaert calculations.
5 Hemispherical lighting.
6 Image Based Lighting with Albedo.
7 Emissive map implementation with diffuse alpha.
8 normalization of normals by default.
9 Specular map implementation with normal map alpha.
10 Specular intensity implementation.
11 Switching -x/-y/-z normals for different normal maps. (3dmax, blender, xnormal have different approaches).
12 Specular Color now works with specular maps
13 Glowblow fragment shader is added with m_GlowIntensity? uniform. It’s possible to change glow intensity for objects. Please, use DiffuseMap? as GlowMap? instead of new additional Glow rgb texture.
I can see why in some cases this patch would be useful. Specifically, many objects in the scene might not even use specularity so this could save a few cycles on old GPUs. However doing it this way means you have much more shader switches which are considered expansive.
@mifth, are you experiencing performance issues, which motivated you to make this change?
About the SpecIntensity parameter, remember you can always scale up the Specular color to achieve the same effect
if you have a scene with 2 millions of polygons it will save you fps indeed. Especially, if you have other gpu effects (hdr, bloom, motion blur, blur etc.). The less shader calculation the better scene performance. I’m talking about complex scenes.
Specular calculations are more complex even than reflection calculations. So i think if you don’t need specular, so it would be better to switch it off.
About Spec SpecIntensity - if you assign a gray specular map you cannot make it more or less intensive (for instance twice or 3 times) with Specular color. SpecIntensity will be more usable as i suppose. It works like in blender, or 3d max or like in unity. I think this is a very important parameter and it presents in every pro shader.
This picture shows on a mesh without maps the SpecIntensity power. You can easily multiply specular twice or devide on a half:
Shader switches are only expensive on old GPU’s actually, all current gpus are able to to use them correctly. (The old do every branch and use ony the one wanted behaviour is kinda dead by now)
Old cpus in fact did not understood it, only newer (will a few years by now) gcs are able to perform branching in the program logic. ( the older ones just did everything procedually from top to bottom and then used only the wanted result.)
Well, I think that one large material is probably simpler to use than dozens of small simple ones. So I think it might be usefull. A stress test for this would be kinda interesting however to see if the assumptions made here are correct.
The 2nd solution can be useful because on NVIDIA cards, if you dont set shininess parameter, the material will look strange due to a bug. This way you avoid both the bug and you get a bit of optimization too.
Well, actually I did boolean like already in the improved material with “SPECULAR_LIGHTING”. If “SPECULAR_LIGHTING” will be switched of, so many computations will be switched off (lightComputeSpecular method, and SpecularSum2 * specularColor * light.y in gl_FragColor).
This is my material how looks like:
[java]
mat = new Material(assetManager, “MatDefs/ma.j3md”);
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