koobas.hobune.stream
Are the AAA games with city scapes using...? (about shaders)
So, games like GTA4, and Spiderman, are they using normal maps on their building windows? or just specular maps? If they are not using normal maps for window indentation, then they are using real geometry. And so, can Unity handle such a thing? Or would it be a good idea to stick with a flat surface and just use specular?
BTW this question is not about the brick or other material, because pretty sure they are using normal maps for THAT, but windows, well, that is a different can of worms(sorta).
Here's some links to spiderman and GTA.
Spiderman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Z-J56N0chjE#!
GTA4:
So I looked at Spider man - it looks to me like a reflective shader and a flat surface in the daytime and an unlit texture at night. But I can't say I spent an age on it.
Well it looks like the whole strip of glass windows is a plane and the concrete is a a cube that juts out in front of it to me. There something cool going on with making the windows look slightly dirty and obscured and the reflection is blurred by some function.
If you don't plan to climb on the buildings (like in spiderman) you could have geometry modelled windows on the first 2 floors and normal/specular map the rest, that would give you detail where you need it and still save a lot of geometry for buildings as tall as the ones in the videos.
I think you could get a lot of this same effect through the use of normal maps.
Normal mapping can't give you geometry that obscures other geometry so any time you can see an angle where something is infront of something else (like the cube which is the concrete appears in front of the windows at some angles) and you know that is geometry. It didn't look like a lot of geometry to me.
