Quake Photography

[scar3crow]

So I'm not much of a photographer, but I do pack a mean f12 bind (hint: it's "screenshot"), and I like doing my best to capture elements of Quake from time to time. Here are a few shots from e2m2, e1m3, and e1m6. I focused on shadows, as I'm running DP with the shadowmaps enabled.

http://www.scar3crow.com/quake/dpshadowmaps/

My favorites are 19 and 28 for their simplicity. Note, these may be very dark for some. I apparently have a monitor composed of The Entire Sun In All Its Grand Luminescence. I also know jack about gamma, but thought others might enjoy these.

[Chip]

They can also be photoshopped and "wallpapered". Like adding glows, color correction, noise and so on.

[frag.machine]

I was looking at that screenshots, and something occurred me: this kind of sharp, solid dynamic shadows simply don't fit well in Quake. What we really need is lightmap-based dynamic shadows; they have a much more dramatic effect.

[goldenboy]

Those shadows really deserve the name... a bit too black for my taste.

Did you use lit files? The e1m6 shots look blueish.

[negke]

Try a longer exposure time next time.

[ceriux]

they look nice to me.

[Junrall]

Wow!

Nice job!
My wife is a professional photographer... I'm sure she would say the same.

I especially like #19 as well... makes a great background for my desktop!

[Irritant]

Shadowmaps are cool, you can really do good stuff with them.

@Lordhavoc - since basically you need to render a shadowmap for each light source, and since there are quite a few light sources in a map, and since you're limited to the amount of textures you can use in GLSL, how are you accounting for this?

My solution was to create light "groups" at map load time, and then choose which to render based on the players POV. While it works decently, there are still the occasional issues of a shadow disappearing if there are too many neighboring light groups when a player moves about.

[mh]

i'm not LH but I would expect that a procedural texture approach would be feasible. Ignore using actual textures as shadowmaps, pass the origins of all current light sources as a shared array parameter (or maybe encoded as a 1D floating point texture), then deal with the whole lot in one pass in your shader. Certain ops like distance calculations needn't be done per-fragment and could be moved to the vertex shader for better efficiency (assuming that you can support per-vertex texture lookup via SM3).

All off the top of my head and there may be gotchas that I've missed.

[scar3crow]

frag.machine; These are not sharp or solid, being shadowmaps they do have a 'fuzzy edge' to them, though its not always apparent at a distance.

goldenboy; I apparently have a monitor brighter than the sun, the shots are roughly 15% as bright on my work monitor as they are on my monitor at home, where I took the shots. I used mh's lit files.

negke; I did use slowmo 0.1 a few times to catch an animating texture at a preferred moment.

ceriux; Thanks =D

Junrall; Thanks as well, I am fond of 19, though I was sad to see on my work monitor that the shadow of the quad forming the Quake symbol did not come out at all. Once again, my home monitor is apparently brighter than the sun.

Irritant; I love having consistent lighting for world, bmodels and models. Also the self shadowing looks so much nicer now (though my own shadow looks a tad odd, being that when I look down, all I am is a gun, but I have a shadow of a full player with a gun).