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June 8, 2009. xNormal 3.16.10 |
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Made the ambient occlusion render softer.
Added an option to skip the file overwrite warning.
Added bright/intensity/contrast/gamma options to the Simple GPU AO Tool
Corrected a lot of bugs. |
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April 20, 2009. xNormal 3.16.8 |
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Added 3dsmax 2010 support.
Improved the software bent normals rendering speed a 200%.
Optimized the BMP image importer a 500%
Solved some bugs ( Maya tangents, DX10 starfield, weld vertices, etc... )
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By the way... Matt Corcoran has made an excellent tutorial about using xNormal.
I
recommend you to take a look. |
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March 17, 2009. xNormal 3.16.7 |
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Modified a bit the mesh cages to produce better results for non-organic models.
Added the "break" and "weld" options to the cage editor.
Now, by default, the cage will be continuous. The user can make it discontinuous
if required.
Improved the software AO rendering speed a 200%. |
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February 17, 2009. xNormal 3.16.6 |
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Solved some bugs:
- OpenGL ".0f" error in the Simple GPU AO tool.
- Ambient occlusion / normal map misalignment.
- Minor problems. |
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January 8, 2009. xNormal 3.16.4 |
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Added SBM mesh importer/exporter support for Maya 8.5, 2008 and 2009.
Added an option to see the vector displacement map's seams in the 3D viewer
Added a new tool: the SBM file converter.
Added a occluded/unoccluded color to the Simple GPU AO tool.
Solved some bugs ( AO from command line, unsigned height map, unnecessary tangent
computation, etc... ) |
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November 21, 2008. xNormal 3.16.3 |
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Added an option to display vector displacement maps in the DX10 graphics driver
( in both object and tangent space ).
It's very interesting because:
1. It gives very good results compared with parallax/relief/cone normal mapping.
2. It's relatively fast ( you gain 100x detail with only a 4x rendering speed cost ).
3. It could be used in DX9 and OpenGL too without problems. Just requires SM3.0
or above.
4. It saves a lot of video memory ( compared with a pre-tessellated static mesh
).
5. It can be used together with animated models.
6. It gives you an idea about the upcoming DX11's techniques. |
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A lot of bugs were solved too ( cavity map MatchUV, Simple GPU AO tool cosine modes,
fixed command line arguments, etc... ). |
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October 27, 2008. xNormal 3.16.2 released. |
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Added an option to match UVs for subdivided meshes.
This can be used to render the maps faster and also easier ( you won't have to setup
any cage nor to measure ray distances )... the primary rays won't need setup. |
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The internal renderer can manage now very dense lowpoly meshes in case you want
to use a subdivided model. This, combined with the new Match UVs feature, can be
a very powerful tool.
Solved some problems with the height maps and now it's possible to render vector
displacement maps. Also it's possible to render multiple maps in one pass. |
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Added a new tool to measure the uniform ray distances in case you don't use cages
and neither the new MatchUV feature. Also added ray blockers support.
The height / thickness / proximity maps are now auto-normalized, so you won't need
to set the min/max distances manually never more. |
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Added support for Self-Occlusion Radiosity Normal Maps ( SSBUMP), used in directional
light mapping ( in both projective rendering and also in the height map/normal map
tool.
Improved a bit the ambient occlusion algorithm with occluded/unoccluded colors and
added a new CosineSq distribution to preverve better the detail for wrinkles
and roughness. |
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Added Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 support ( including x64 filters ).
Added a new tool to generate ambient diffuse cube maps from cubic environment mapping.
It also can output spherical harmonics coefficients. |
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Improved the memory management for the images. Now should be possible to render
bigger bitmaps without running out of RAM.
Improved the SDK's compatibility with some compilers.
Solved a lot of bugs. |
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September 1, 2008. xNormal 3.16.1 has been released. |
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I finally added RSS 2.0 feed support for the web. Hurrayy! Click on the right icon, using your web browser's RSS autodiscover or over the RSS big letters on the web's main menu.
Also added permalinks for each page's news ( the small blue and white arrows ). |
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Added an option to disable the tiles's updating in the preview window ( to gain some
speed ). Also added a new map type ( the ray direction map ).
By popular demand, xNormal no longer uses adaptive sampling. It was hard to configure
and the final quality suffered a lot.
Improved a bit the quad face support and optimized the loading times ( specially
for the .OBJ importer ).
Added an option to re-topologize two meshes using tangent space normal maps to avoid
seams ( "the base texture is a tangent space normal map" checkbox in the high resolution
mesh list ). |
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Added a new GPGPU map renderer based on the NVIDIA CUDA 2 techonology to accelerate
the ray tracing mechanism.
Although the renderer it's not very optimized yet, the results are interesting.
You can test it using these NVIDIA beta drivers with CUDA2 support ( the official ones don't support CUDA 2 yet ): Download CUDA 2.0 beta drivers
To see if your graphics card is supported by CUDA 2 you can go to this NVIDIA's CUDA-enabled GPU list web page.
Also solved a lot of bugs
( including the AA pixelization inherited from the 3.15.X versions, fixed the cone map tool, etc... ). |
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June 27, 2008. New tutorial. |
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Anton Kozlov made a good video tutorial about generating normal maps with xNormal
using an object exported from ZBrush. |
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June 1, 2008. xNormal 3.15.2 released. |
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A small patch:
Added an option to the "render wireframe and ray fails" to display UV seams. This
is specially good to detect tangent-space problems.
Solved some bugs ( incorrect mesh clear, a crash when you set the sampling minAA=1
/ maxAA=1 crash, etc... ). |
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May 25, 2008. xNormal 3.15.1 released. |
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Now you can render three new map types:
- Wireframe and CW uv face map.
- Ray fails map.
- Cavity map. |
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Added 3dsmax 2009 support.
Also added a 3dsmax SBM importer. |
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Added global illumination and radiance in the realtime ray tracing graphics driver.
Also improved the rasterization precision ( which is very noticeable while rendering
the ambient occlusion ).
Added a new technology to default renderer to prevent seams. I want to thank
Morten Mikkelsen for all his help with it. |
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Finally, solved some bugs. By the way, if you use the old 3.15.0 better delete it...
It used a buggy normals compression that could cause small but noticeable artifacts
in the tangent basis. |
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April 18, 2008. xNormal 3.14.6 released. |
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Improved a bit the user interface with things like:
- Multiple selections
- Drag and drop
- Autoassign cages
- Button to clear meshes
Also made the preview window bigger. |
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Solved some bugs with the NVIDIA GeForce 7 series cards with the OpenGL graphics
driver. I was running out of interpolators and texture units due to the complexity
of some shaders... so they were restructured to use less instructions and registers. |
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Solved problems with multiple monitors.
Now is possible to specify if you want to use Dualview / MultiMon or not. |
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Added a new and interesting feature to harden the vertex normals. In that way the
vertex normals will be set equal to the face's normal. Somebody told me that could
be useful to avoid beveling for hard-edged objects like a cube.
And, to finish, fixed several minor bugs. |
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April 13, 2008. New tutorial about ambient occlusion/cavity. |
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Donald Phan has made an excellent tutorial
about ambient occlusion and cavity maps using xNormal.
You can find more info on the tutorials section or directly HERE |
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April 4, 2008. xNormal 3.14.5 released. |
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Added a gamma correction option to the DX10 graphics driver.
Corrected the DX10 tone map operator to be more sensible to the exposure.
Added some ambient cubemap probes donated by Håkan Persson based on Devebec's lighting
probes.
Solved more bugs. |
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March 29, 2008. xNormal 3.14.4 released.
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Improved the DX10 graphics driver with screen-space ambient occlusion ( SSAO ).
Here is a video showing the effect. Notice you can control the AO radius, bright
and also the bias to solve self occlusion problems.
It runs very fast and it's taking 64 samples.
Currently is only available in the DX10 graphics driver, but will be ported soon
to the DX9 and OpenGL drivers too. The technique can be ported very easy and could
be used for dynamic scenes too.
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Added a fake'n'fast indirect-lighting feature. Added a new example ( the
Cornell box scene ) to show the global illumination effect.
I gonnal try to improve it much more soon.
Enhaced a bit the quality of the ray tracing realtime graphics driver too. Now runs
at the same speed than the previous adaptive version but at much more resolution.
Also recompiled the program to use SSE (
you'll notice a small 5-10% speed increase ). Expect even more speed improvements in future versions.
Some bugs were corrected too. |
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