59.) Welcome to Materialize

       Check out Materialize created by Bounding Box Software! This is an awesome free tool which enables you to quickly create several different types of material pas from a single image. You can create an entire material from either a single image or import textures you have already and generate the textures you desire. Materialize was used in the the popular Uncharted 1 and 2 games to help generate metallic, smoothness, and occlusion textures. You can create Height, Normal, AO, Edge, Metalness and Smoothness maps in just seconds with an interactive preview, all from a single texture source. 

Open Source
Materialize is open source under the GNU GPL v3. The Unity project source code is hosted on github:

• github.com/BoundingBoxSoftware/Materialize

More Links 

• Games From Scratch 
• Tutorials
• Downloads

41. Deferred Rendering

       Roy Trieesscheijn has an updated XNA 4.0 version of Catalin Zima's Deferred Rendering Sample. You can read all about it here on Roy's blog. Above is a screenshot of it in action. I have also uploaded the sample to my Indie DB page. So I give a special thanks to Roy for the awesome conversion and Catalin Zima for the original sample. The deferred rendering sample uses directional and point lights and comes equipped with a normal mapping and custom content processor with multiple materials. I plan on adding deferred rendering to the Cyclone Game Engine. 

       One big advantage of deferred rendering is that it will allow your games and or game engines to render a huge number of dynamic lights very efficiently. Right now it is used in Cry Engine, Unreal Engine, Frostbite and many other games and game engines. This rendering technique has quickly become the standard for high quality graphics in games. Deferred Rendering will allow for a huge number of effects to be added to your games. These effects include SSAO, HDR Rendering, Bloom, Per-Pixel Lens Flares and Soft-Particles just to name a few. 

Source Code:

36. XNA 4.0 Parallax Occlusion Mapping

     

       Recently, I came across Electronic Meteor's blog post which updated the Parallax Occlusion Mapping Sample to XNA 4.0. In short, parallax mapping is a way to make textures pop out. It's a very efficient way to add depth to a texture, so there is no tessellation here. Parallax Occlusion Mapping was utilized in the hit first-person shooter game called Crysis. This sample also demonstrates another technique called Normal Mapping. In this sample you can switch between the techniques to see each of their effects. The sample was originally created by Alex Alvarex Urban and updated to XNA 3.1 by Canton Javier Ferrero. Thanks to Chris, the sample was updated to XNA 4.0, however he ran into some problems getting the particle system to work. In time, I was able to fix it. I have made the source code available at the following link below for download. If you have found this sample helpful or run into any problems, please comment below.

Also, on a side note, make sure under the File Properties for the smoke.png image, click the drop-down arrow under Content Processor and set the following values like so if they aren't already:

• Color Key Enabled = True
• Generate Mipmaps = True
• Premultiplay Alpha = False
• Resize to Power of Two = False
• Texture Format = DxtCompressed


Download

• XNA 4.0: Download