Physically Based Materials

I'm continuing to work on improving object reflections in 3DWorld. The past few weeks I've been trying to integrate reflective objects into the engine as physically-based materials. As a first step, I provided a way to create and throw spheres and cubes with user-defined material properties as dynamic objects in the scene. The properties are specified in a config text file in keyword/value format. There is also a simple UI for realtime editing of material parameters and creating new materials. The UI is an in-game text overlay with arrow key input similar to the onscreen display you would find in a computer monitor. It's very simple but usable. I would like to use the mouse to select menu items, but I think it would interfere with the user's ability to play the game and interact with the world while the menu system was active.

The material parameters supported are:

• Material Name - User-defined text string identifier
• Texture - Name/filename of texture to use; "none" to disable texturing
• Normal Map - Name/filename of normal map texture to use; "none" to disable normal mapping
• Shadows - Flag to enable cube map shadows for point light spheres
• Emissive - Flag to mark as having an emissive color (no lighting)
• Reflective - Flag to mark surface as reflective (using an environment cube map)
• Destroyability - Tag to mark as destroyable, shatterable, exploding, static, etc.
• Metalness - Value in [0,1] to represent dielectric vs. metal
• Hardness - Value in [0,1] to set hardness for elastic collision physics
• Density - Value of material density, used to compute mass and buoyancy in water
• Specular Magnitude - Magnitude of specular light reflection in [0,1]
• Specular Shininess - Shininess of specular light reflection, converted to surface roughness
• Alpha - Value in [0,1] to specify alpha value of partially transparent objects such as glass
• Light Attenuation - Factor for computing transparency and scattering within the material
• Index of Refraction - Value for controlling reflection and refraction in glass, plastic, etc.
• Light Radius - Radius of light emission for light source spheres
• Diffuse Color - {R,G,B} diffuse, emissive, or light source color value
• Specular Color - {R,G,B} specular color value ((1,1,1)=white for non-metals)

For example, the material "Gold" is specified as:
hardness 0.8
density 19.29
alpha 1.0
reflective 1
metalness 1.0
specular_mag 1.0
specular_exp 128.0
diffuse_color 0.0 0.0 0.0
specular_color 0.9 0.6 0.1
add_material Gold

I recorded several videos showing how 3DWorld's dynamic, throw-able spheres and cubes work, including realtime editing of material parameters. I feel that videos are required to show these features. It's just too hard to tell what's going on in static images. I can only cover a small fraction of the materials, parameters, and features available in these short videos.

Sorry, none of these videos were recorded with sound. The only sounds I have enabled in these tests are for throwing and bouncing anyway. These videos are too long to record with the free version of Fraps (which has sound). The FFmpeg video recording wrapper support in 3DWorld can record unlimited length videos and compress them in realtime, but I haven't figured out how to record audio yet in Windows.

Here is a video of me throwing spheres of various materials around in the scene and editing the material parameters in realtime. Everything in the scene is reflected in mirror surfaces, including the placeholder smiley player model.

This is a video showing dynamic sphere point lights and cube mapped shadows in a dark room. Lighting, shadows, reflections, and various other parameters can be assigned to materials and edited in-game.

I later decided to add support for dynamic material cubes as well as spheres. Here is a video of me throwing some cubes around and changing their textures and normal maps. Cubes and spheres use partially elastic collision models and will propagate collision forces around when piled up on top of or against each other. They can be stacked, pushed around the scene, and the player can stand on them, though there are some issues with simulation/physics stability.

Density is one of the material parameters that can be modified in realtime through the material editor. The material's density affects the amount of resistance to pushing and its buoyancy in water. In this video, I edit the density of the brick cubes, which affects how high they float in the water or how quickly they sink. The player can stand on and stack objects on the cubes as well, and everything works correctly. Spheres can also be used.

This is a video of my incomplete puzzle/platformer scene. It uses a variety of different effects and materials. The marble floor and some of the glass surfaces are plane reflectors. I haven't finished all of the traps and obstacles, and the various sections aren't even fully connected. I had to use the "flight mode" cheat to get to the second section. I'll post more screenshots and videos of this map later when it nears completion.

 I'm continuing to work on dynamic objects and materials. I would like to add support for the other shape types supported by 3DWorld: polygon, extruded polygon, cylinder, cone, capsule, and torus. I'm also considering adding more physics properties to the editable materials list, for example parameters for friction, air resistance, deformation, elasticity, player damage, etc. Regular dynamic 3DWorld objects such as weapon projectiles and pickup items use fixed materials, which already have all of these properties. Finally, I would like to add a way to make these objects into efficient static scene objects so that this mode acts like an in-game scene/map editor. I'm curious to see what the performance is when there are thousands of placed objects of dozens of different materials in the scene.