Dear team
Purchasing Sunburn was one of the best things I've done in a while. The results I'm getting for my XNA projects are (for me) breath taking.
This feature may be in the product roadmap, but if not...
After reading several forum threads surrounding semi-transparent blended (rather than clipped) surfaces, I'm rendering such things outside of the Sunburn engine scene. I think it looks great... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoASttN55xA (port holes) ... But lacking in proper lighting. My requests is a simple one (no doubt complicated) - Could you bring alpha blend capabilities in to your deferred light render engine? My thoughts are that there is perhaps a way of deferring the alpha blend surfaces (or perhaps meshpart) to be drawn last when building up the deferred textures? Having semi transparent surfaces that reflect a % of the lights would be useful.
Wow your video looks awesome - excellent work! Are the wall normal maps baked down or hand painted?
For anyone who didn't check out the link here's the video, definitely worth watching:
Thanks for the feedback, alpha blending is on our development road map. We have a number of prototypes running, and we're trying to find the best balance of ease-of-use, performance, and visual quality.
Great work - I can't wait to see more!
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I saw this video yesterday and it looked amazing! I can't wait to see more updates on this.
Hey Bob, thanks for responding. Glad you have Alpha blend in the works.
I'm not sure what you mean by baked down, but yes, the walls are normal mapped and hand drawn. I did try using a parallax height map as well, but it just looked odd.
I tend to use GIMP for most of the texture work. Use gray scale heightmap then convert to normal map. Surprisingly easy (Gradient file for bulge with corner creases drawn from each button. A bit of noise and blur over the top to smooth). Rotating the texture map (mapping co-ordinates) by 45' so that padding looks diagonal really helps I think (earlier video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gziy8gRZRNc shows texture without rotation ... not as good).
Sunburn is a great product ... Keep up the good work.