Followup: Normal Mapping Without Precomputed Tangents

This post is a fol­low-up to my 2006 ShaderX5 arti­cle [4] about nor­mal map­ping with­out a pre-com­put­ed tan­gent basis. In the time since then I have refined this tech­nique with lessons learned in real life. For those unfa­mil­iar with the top­ic, the moti­va­tion was to con­struct the tan­gent frame on the fly in the pix­el shad­er, which iron­i­cal­ly is the exact oppo­site of the moti­va­tion from [2]:

Since it is not 1997 any­more, doing the tan­gent space on-the-fly has some poten­tial ben­e­fits, such as reduced com­plex­i­ty of asset tools, per-ver­tex band­width and stor­age, attribute inter­po­la­tors, trans­form work for skinned mesh­es and last but not least, the pos­si­bil­i­ty to apply nor­mal maps to any pro­ce­du­ral­ly gen­er­at­ed tex­ture coor­di­nates or non-lin­ear defor­ma­tions. Weit­er­lesen

Velvet Assassin on Mac (Patch)

I just got news that Vel­vet Assas­sin has been port­ed over to the Mac and is avail­able on the App Store! How­ev­er, I was not at all involved in the Mac port and I don’t know the devel­op­ers who did – it came as a sur­prise to me as to any­one else in the for­mer team. Here is a direct iTunes link: (Edit, no longer avail­able as of 2021, unfortunately).

Shader Bug on ATI graphic cards

Unfor­tu­nate­ly there is a shad­er bug with ATI graph­ics chips.  It hap­pened to me while try­ing it out on a 2011 iMac with an ATI Radeon HD 5670. I got reports from friends that this is not a prob­lem of the Mac port itself but it hap­pens on PC too. The prob­lem is relat­ed to ATI chips with dri­vers that are new­er than 2010 or so. Here is a screenshot:

Screen shot 2013-01-11 at 04.09.06

Weit­er­lesen