The Official Supermodel Work-in-Progress Thread

[cable]

He must have seriously reliable sources for that...

Ha ha like the ones working on demul!! Though i hope he's right about a new release.

[Bart]

So as to minimize confusion, I'm locking this thread down so that only Nik and I can post official WIP updates. General discussion should be carried out in other threads.

[Bart]

Finally posted a small update on the news page. Nothing too big.

[Bart]

Finally showing some signs of life. Still a long way to go but it's kind of fun playing in wireframe mode

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[Bart]

A lot of my efforts over the past few years have been concentrated on fixing the lighting model. Most users are aware of polygon and texture glitches but are less likely to notice that shading is often very wrong. In Scud Race, it can be minor details like the brightness of waterfalls or the airport terminal ceiling, while in LA Machineguns, there are missing shadows everywhere resulting in a "flat" look that feels wrong in some subtle way. Each Model 3 polygon has a number of different shading modes and, unfortunately, we don't understand how they all work let alone how they are controlled.

Late last night, I discovered that just like the Real3D Pro-1000, Model 3 does in fact have a per-vertex fixed shading mode, which allowed artists to assigned fixed lighting intensities to each vertex. The impact on games which use it will be very noticeable. Here is a screenshot of LA Machineguns running on Wii with correct lighting:

Wii version

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In Supermodel, it looks flat, but you can see hints of the shaded region if you look closely:

Supermodel (incorrect)

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Forcing it to use fixed shading looks better:

Supermodel with fixed shading

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There is still lots more work to be done. For starters, although we now know where the shading values were hiding, we have to figure out how this mode is actually controlled.