For me this was an exercise in basic modelling and texturing, efficient blender to JME pipeline, using cinematic and fine tuning various effects filters.
The scene is unlit (no lights), no shadows, no texture baking, no specular highlights, so it does look pretty flat, those will come next.
The project is currently named Frac, because I started it exploring breakable glass, utilising Fracturing in Blender, then got pretty heavily sidetracked =)
I discovered a super useful Blender Tip - Apply scale, rotation and location to a model ::
Because you must clear all rotation (alt + r) scale (alt + s) and locations (alt + g) before importing models, I often do this as a last step before exporting, at which point I discover I have abused all of the above and all my models gets screwed up, and I have to go in and edit all my meshes to get them back in the correct places. New to me, an art noob, blender can “apply” the scale, rotation and location to the mesh for you. If you didn’t know this, you’re welcome, if you did know this, poo you for not telling me about it =P
I have 2 questions, Is the reflection on the floor is a jME material? and is the camera animation is done in blender and exported as keyframe animation.
I also have interest about the reflection, it’s look like an advanced blending not just a simple “mirror”. You know the reflection image is a bit blurry as intend and result in good effect to the whole screen. Please give more insight about it, @thetoucher
I have done a bit work on the reflection since the video, not much, just tidied up the blurring, which was very pixely before, and improved the blending with the floor texture. It’s some what a slap together attempt to approximate the effect I envisage in my head.
I turned off the mats on the floor so you can see the reflections better. In the scene the floor is mostly hidden by the mats so I can get away with a lower quality effect.
The reflection is not screen space, there is a scene processor rendering an off screen “reflection” of the scene and supplies my custom JME material shader with color and depth information, just like the SimpleWaterProcessor. The material shader boosts the gain on the bright areas, then blurs and fades based on distance from the “floor”. There really isn’t much too it. It’s not a very generic solution, and is very tailored for use in this specific scene, because that’s all I need it for.
The next steps on the reflective floor would be to:
fine tune the effect - when I get around to writing a UI;
linearising the depth buffer so the effect is more consistent - I've been lazy and used the buffer as it;
tweak the blurring applied to the depth buffer - to help alleviate some annoying artefacts
add a rough normal map which will really help diffuse the effect, hopefully spreading out the bright areas more;
experiment with switching some of the "distance from floor" calculations to "angle of incidence" - this might help make the effect look more how I want.
