New Hex/boxel engine baked ambient occlusion WIP Video

3 days ago I started working on a hex tile engine for my next project. I wasn’t really going to bother sharing much until I was much further into the project but I couldn’t resist sharing the work I did today on baked Ambient Occlusion. The idea has been in my head for a few nights so today I sat down and bashed it out… the boxel mesh has a 2nd set of texture coords that are generated to work with an atlas of pre-baked ambient occlusion tiles. Its not perfect but its super fast since its only a texture lookup. There is still room for some improvements on the atlas which would smooth out the overall effect… I missed a couple of permutations :/.



I’m a spastic when it comes to video recording and encoding, so HD video’s were just not going to happen for me tonight. I uploaded a super muddy video of the lighting deconstruction, please don’t pay too much attention to the horrible placeholder textures, the video it’s more about the lighting specifically the AO:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJAChWk8IUc&hd=1



and here are some 720p screenshots showing the same thing:

everything on (1 ambient light + shadows + ao + 1 directional light):
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao01.png

ao off:
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao02.png

1 ambient light only:
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao03.png

1 ambient light + shadows
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao04.png

1 ambient light + ao
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao05.png

1 ambient light + shadows + ao
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao06.png


1 ambient light + shadows + ao + 1 directional light
http://dropbox.afterhoursgamestudio.com/ao07.png

Cheers
James
8 Likes

Awesome stuff man, we should add light map baking soon :wink:

1 Like

nice!

Cool! Reminds me of Battle Isle.

Battle Isle! Oh the hours I spent with playing that on Amiga500 ^^

YAAAAAAAAAAAY!

@normen said:
Awesome stuff man, we should add light map baking soon ;)


I'll wait .
@glaucomardano said:
I'll wait .

Uh, by "we" I meant the whole community ;)
1 Like

I was thinking how to develop a Hex engine just like that for my project. Hehe, your’s looks really nice, mine isn’t even running yet!