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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 some experimental GPGPU CUDA implementations.
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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