Smooth Shade

[MadGypsy]

Nevermind the model it isn't even a WIP. I am just playing with different edge loop patterns. What I want to know is:

Blender has a function to smooth shade "edgy" models. I was wondering if any of the Quake engines had a similar feature or a work around that didn't involve normal maps. The smooth shaded image below is not subdivided or different from the flat shaded model in any way. The only "difference" is I pressed "w" and selected shade smooth.

flat shade

smooth shade

[Spike]

yes, yes they do.

[MadGypsy]

:/ how about this:

What Quake engine has that feature and how do I use it? (lol)

jackass - you knew what info I actually wanted.

[MH]

GLQuake can smooth-shade models, just set gl_smoothmodels 1 (which I'm pretty certain is actually the default) and it will do it. Any other custom engine should also do it provided the coder in question hasn't changed that. No idea about software Quake.

This shading will be per-vertex rather than per-pixel but in practice for Quake MDLs it doesn't really matter much. Per-pixel isn't possible without shaders.

One of the real problems with Quake MDL lighting is that the normals it uses are rough approximations rather than properly derived, so it's always going to be a little "off". The joys of originally targetting an 8 MB MS-DOS machine. Another problem is that it quantizes lighting angles for looking up a pre-computed dotproduct table - more 1996 tech happiness, but many engines fix that.

[Spike]

every single one. by default. even software rendering.
blender is also vertex-lit.
yes, there are precision issues (only 162 or so different directions), but its otherwise implemented.

[MadGypsy]

@ - every single one

Wow, that's pretty handy. Thank you both for the information.