Plane-Deformation and Bezier Curve Demos

Beautiful . Just recently downloaded the beta of VDMX and am going to hook these up.

Thanks. :-)

Old-school LUT effects :D There are tons of effects like this in old demos.. it was a good way to get some good looking effects running on slower processors.

There are tons of effects you can do like this, like easy infinite tunnels (and strange shaped or curvy tunnels aren't difficult too), fake raytracing, etc. (To do fake raytracing, you have a static raytraced scene with spheres or whatever, then create a LUT that will map a texture around the spheres. Scroll a message across the texture and add it in 3d in the actual scene, and it looks like you're raytracing the reflections in realtime..)

Cool. I guess all this stuff can be done in the shader these days. Having said that, I was thinking maybe this method would benefit from QC's 'lazy execution', in that, since the LUT is static, it would only have to be generated once, saving a lot of per-pixel code that would otherwise execute every frame. Dunno if this is actually the case, mind you...

a|x

Well, the 'oldschool' way to do it would be: generate the base texture once, generate the LUT once, then draw it to screen just offsetting the texture coordinates to animate. Lazy execution would just do pretty much the same. But yeah, it's definitely a good job for a shader.

Actually, the advantage of shaders here is pretty much the opposite: you have some more power available, that it's not necessary to prepare the LUT + texture in advance, you can easily make something extra cool per-frame. Doing a cool animated texture say, or animating the LUT so you have a cool twisting, morphing tunnel.. the possibilities are pretty endless.