Progress Update - February 2020 W04 (Patreon)

Hey all!

It's been a very productive week, so I'm happy to say I've got a lot of progress to show off :).

I'm also currently rendering more of the Meet-the-Soldier short, you can see some previews above. It's not going to be a complete render quite yet, since some features are still missing or incomplete (e.g. depth of field, particles, etc.), but I'm getting closer. The video should be ready some time tomorrow.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the changes this week:

3D Skyboxes

I've added support for Source Engine 3D skyboxes, including support for Cycles rendering. Not much to say here, they work exactly the same way as in the Source Engine!

Texture blending for displacements

This is something I've already added support for a long time ago, but it broke somewhere down the line. Anyway, texture blending for displacements now works properly again, and I've also added support for it when rendering with Cycles.

Support for Source Engine self-shadowed bump maps

Many Source Engine materials (especially in TF2) use something called self-shadowing bumpmaps, which are essentially normal maps with some baked lighting; these would show up with visual errors in Pragma. They're automatically converted to normal maps now, which should fix those problems:

Improved Source Engine map conversion times

Loading a Source Engine map in Pragma for the first time could take excruciatingly long in some cases. The reason was the bin-packing algorithm I used for creating the lightmap atlas from the lightmaps in the map; I've switched to a different, less accurate (but much faster) algorithm, which cuts down the conversion times by about 95% or more (depending on the map). The conversion should now take only a few seconds, even for large/complex maps. 

New Cycles options

I've added some new options when rendering with Cycles:

• Device Type: You can now switch between CPU and GPU rendering. Only OpenCL (AMD) is currently supported for GPU rendering.

• Light intensity factor: Scales the light intensity of map light sources. A value of 0 disables map lighting altogether.

• Transparency bounces: Low transparency bounces can cause black artifacts if many transparent objects are in the scene. High values get rid of the artifacts, but may increase render times.

Particle updates

There is still a lot work ahead to fully support Source Engine particles, but I'm making a lot of progress. They can now be rendered with Cycles (still experimental) and I've added support for scripted initializers/operators/renderers (no emitters yet) using Lua. For example:

This example operator results in the following particle movement: 

Here's a test-scene with particles rendered using Cycles. There's still a lot of tweaking I have to do:

I was going to release another update this week, but I'll have to delay that by a few days... There will definitely be an update next week though :)!

Anyway, that's all of this week, but there'll be another post tomorrow once the rendering is complete.

Have a great weekend!