February 15, 2012, 05:44:41 pm
Remko.
The effect of refraction in the sphere seems realistic.
The refraction/reflection effect is really easy but the main problem is it works only in a few cases. Essentially reflection is a cube map Like in Lumion so that's exacly the same. In Lumion you would have to create a ball, assign the glass material or something else reflective and place the reflection point in the ball. Refraction is the same as reflection but instead of using the reflected vector to look up the reflection map coordinates you use the refraction vector. Only works with balls and stuff like that but currently it's the best way to fake refraction.
We could in theory distort the background but it would not look as good and you can only have one layer of this material and not see one refracted material trough the other. If you want to have that capability we have to grab the render buffer for each individual object before moving to the next. This is really slow!
I think by the way that most of the stuff you see here will be included with quest3d as a refernece project. It has sun shadows, ssoa an things like that. It does not have the skinned shaders yet and also no spot lights right now.