This looks lovely. I really want to see it moving. I can imagine all the materials giving off rich glistening reflections as the camera moves around.
I did a similar thing to your shafts of light on a ut2003 map I made ages ago. Even just a slight angle to the shaft changed the atmosphere of the scene. I suppose that would probably make the lights cast on the floor a bit more difficult to get right?
Keep it up 
Yay I have something to post: videos from the bathhouse.
Fairly simple video but at least it’s something. Finally fixed the uvs on the domes and the main roof and added a temp texture to the floor.
Any suggestions for the floor texture?
Plants coming soonish 
Hi, i downloaded the smaller 3mb video, gotta say that’s looking good! I have a question tho, since you’re posting in the game art forum, which realtime rendering engine are you using?
The water looks like a fresnel-type water shader, is it? I suppose those are static lightmaps which would be the most efficient solution for that type of scene, right? Or is this rendered in un-real time.
At the moment I’m cheating and rendering it in max but eventually it will be exported with lightmaps and normalmaps to a 3d engine a friend of mine has coded. There he/we will add a pixelshader for the water that will feature reflection, refraction and a nice noise map (I asume hehe). The faked volumetric lighting shouldn’t be a problem either since it’s just a gradient that will be tagged as additive in-engine. Not sure if he wants to do it but he could probably code a proper volumetric light if I begged him…
Apart from the antialiasing and the texture filtering, it’s not too far from how it will look in-engine. I hope. I’m going to exprot it for him to play with this week and hopefully I’ll be able to post some screenshots later on.
Oh i see, well AA and anisotropic filtering should be possible in any half-decent engine, especially if it can handle shaders it should handle that as well. Make sure you mention it to him. And tell him to find a fresnel water shader (i beleive thats its propper name) for the water, that will look best in that scene. There is one example with the Ogre engine SDK demos so he can rip it out and put it in his engine. Volumetric lights you can do by simply placing a bunch of quads as a box dropping around the window from inside with add texture blend mode of the light gradient. Works every time… And make sure to give us a link when it’s done in realtime so we can DL it. I never see people posting realtime demos of their game art. Whats up with that??
Fresnel is the right word. I’m using it for the reflections so that they are more pronounced the lower the angle you look at the water. The volumetrics is done the way you said (I think) with a box at every light, textured with a gradient. Or do you mean that he can do it in-engine?
I will most definitely post the final result here when it’s done. All that is left at the moment is to add a nice texture to the floor and a better ceiling texture. Bonus features would be normalmaps for everything, plants hanging from the ceiling, better paintings for the walls and maybe a statue in the middle of it all
I think most people either don’t know how to get their stuff into a game engine, are too lazy to do it or think that a render looks better so why bother with realtime. Who knows
Wohoo 5 stars
As promised, here’s a preview of the scene in engine. No proper lighting and a lot of bloom (my friend likes bloom heh) but it gives you an idea of what it will look like. Got to love the fact that he named the engine “pie”
The credit for everything but the model goes to my coder friend, he’s the one who brought it into the engine, created the water shader (and the Pie 3d engine, coded in Phyton :))
Glad you all like it, hopefully we will have a nicer version up soon!
I can finally see it in super real time (well, almost!). Wheeee!
Now make it fall apart with realtime dynamics.
Hey, thats looks ace!
Caustics can be faked in a shader with two reflection textures and scrolling uv’s in different direction, I’m not a programmer, so I can’t tell how it should be done, but we did it this way at work, and it looks quite good.
Nice work, Urg! Love the refraction.
Can you beg your programmer to add a fresnel effect to the reflection? It would rock! And perhaps some bluish fog for the water.
Also, what’s up with programmers and ugly fonts? It must be in their genes
Did someone mention fresnel?
He will implement fog under water and some other nifty things eventually and I will try to add more pleasing things soon (petals on the water for example)
