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Environment – drawn first. Commonly used for the skybox.
Opaque – opaque meshes are drawn front to back so we can leverage depth testing and have less overdraw.
Fur – fur meshes are very peculiar, they have instanced meshes, where the first layer is opaque and the rest are transparent or blended. Meshes rendered through this queue are sorted back to front.
Alpha Test – rendered back to front, pixels under a certain alpha value are discarded. This is a more efficient way of adding transparent surfaces.
Blended – transparent meshes, rendered back to front.
Overlay – reserved for UI
Shadows
Animaze rendered surface can cast and receive shadows, both processes being independent from each other.
Casting shadows makes the rendered surface be rendered through a shadow pass, building up a shadow map. Receiving shadows makes the Animaze Shader map the already rendered shadow map.
All three numerical values are used to get rid of the shadow mapping artifacts.
Slope bias factor - scale factor that is used to create a variable depth offset for each polygon when rendering the shadow map
Slope bias units - constant depth offset when rendering the shadow map;
Depth bias- screen space value that is used to offset the object depth before comparing it to the shadow map value.
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Additional components can be added to a selected mesh within the Animaze Editor:
Specular Normal Mapping – an extra normal map to be used instead of the regular one when computing reflection and specular, usually used for eyes meshes.
Static Color – a color component which overrides any other color texture on that mesh; usually useful for particle systems.
Texture Alterator – basically a gradient color mask used for dilation of the pupil which can be fed by animation data. In order to attain this, you must have a unique mapping for the eye, placed in its center. The mask with full intensity (white) must have the size of the pupil, while the gradient from white to black must have the size of the iris.
Color Customization Maps
Animaze supports 2 types of color customizations, and we are detailing them below:
Classic color customization
Allows full-color control. Uses two textures: a Customization mask and a Desaturated Diffuse (grayscale)texture.
For example, for customizing the Crown King prop pictured below , that has the respective Diffuse texture, you will need to create:
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a desaturated Diffuse texture - lighter in color because the colors from customization mask will be overlayed on this texture
a Custom mask RGBA texture with info on all channels - break the parts you want to color separately. The green part represents the green channel, red for the red channel, and blue for the blue channel.
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The next step is to add these customization maps on your item. Do so by followingthis tutorial.
Hue Shifter color customization -
Obtain more details and color variation, with less control over individual colors.
uses only an RGBA texture
the texture must contain a black alpha channel
The hue shifter makes method use of a color average that you need to calculate from the diffuse texture. Here is how:
open the diffuse texture in Photoshop
make a selection of each part from the customization mask on the RGB channels (in our case, the prop has the gold part and the jewels part)
go to FILTER > BLUR > AVERAGE
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Select the color with color picker, afterwhich you need to copy the color code you obtain and add it in the Editor with prefix FF. See example below:
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The code above is used further in Animaze Editor, to be set in the Customization Options, for Color & Average Color:
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In the example above, we selected the golden part of the crown to show how it needs to be done. The same procedure must be ran for the parts of the diffuse texture that contain the jewels.
Add the Hue Shifter customization through Animaze Editor, as shown here.