Me: “But Abi! Surely I should work on bug fixes rather than implementing Depth of Field.”

Project Manager: “No, Hazel. You must work on awesome graphics effects.”

Me: “Sweeeet.”

Ok, so I’m paraphrasing a little but if there was a film of the actual situation I’m pretty certain this would have been the dialogue. We’d been talking about macro-photography inspired depth-of-field effects for a while but I wasn’t sure we’d actually find time to get it working. In reality, it took less than a day to implement, didn’t kill our framerate and (I think) looks fantastic.

Although I’ve really only been sharing bright and shiny screenshots of our game, it actually progresses from a sunny farm through to a dark and creepy forest. Naturally, this meant it was time to focus on implementing a coherent lighting model for the level. At the moment we’re working with ambient lighting, two directional lights and two spot lights per short section of our game.

In addition, I’ve been looking at methods for shadowing and shading. Each bee is an intricate model, but scaled down it would be easy to lose a lot of the detail. As you can hopefully see in the following images, shading adds some depth and makes the bees appear far more three dimensional.

Shade by distance from ground.

Shade when normals point down.

Combined Shading Techniques.

Combined With Lighting.

 
 Similar techniques applied across the entire scene also improves the overall appearance, with and without lighting:

 
 Finally, here’s an additional happier version of the shot above, just to show the difference a change in lighting can make:

I like how colourful this game is making my blog look! We’ve had the ability to add post-processing effects to our game easily for a couple of weeks now, but have only just considered what to do with that. Inspired by some of the effect from rendering fur over the weekend, I created some examples of a brushstroke shader in effect the game. It’s good having a colourful 3D environment to play with like this.

Although it looks nice in screenshots, the way that assets move and colours change make it look as if the screen is swimming and as such is impractical for use in the game. I think with some consideration it would be possible to create an impressive looking environment in this way however it isn’t really suitable or relevant for what we’re working on now. So it’s something to consider another time.

Brushstrokes shader.

More brushstrokes.

 
 Along the way, we also played with a few different effects (a couple of which are shown below). At the end of the day though we don’t want to do anything which will cause huge changes to the textures Abi is creating, and simply having a coherent lighting model (which we do now!) greatly improves the game’s appearance.

Horrible toon(ish) shading.

Alpha values. Pretty, I guess.