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Description
The image shows couple of screenshots from our latest demo production called "Final Audition" which has won at Evoke'2005 demoscene party. It also contains a screenshot from our working environment which is maya with attached picoEngine v2.3 plugin. The plugin is transparently working with maya allowing him for realtime previewing of changing of attributes in Dependency Graph as well as in Dag Hierarchy Graph. The changes between version 2.2 and 2.3 are significant. While using openGL we're trying to get rid off the WGL extensions and framebuffer_object extension surely helped us a lot. So the main change is rewriting every render to texture code so it now runs on FBO's. Another new feauture is particle shader which is still in early stage of development but even now it can offer couple of neat tricks - like the particle HDRI spheres.
The main task of "Final Audition" project was to show that picoEngine is not designed only for attaching arbitrary shaders to 3d models but can also work with typical demoscene effects (like
metaballs, differential surfaces, spherical harmonics, DLA and 3D julia fractals) without any hardcode.
Due to the many fixes in latest Catalyst drivers and FBO extension we could now write shadowmapping and uberlights with volumetric shapes (with shadowmaps).
Another interesting part is general instancing which is transparently working with Maya. It means that You can instance every node using Maya interface. It's really useful to model big scenes with lots and lots of effects and models.
But the most interesting news that comes with that picture is that we're currently working on opening our source of the engine for public. So stay tuned!
For additional information, visit: http://www.plastic-demo.org
