How to make DP render flat-shaded?

[Sajt]

[Spike]

[Urre]

Seems odd to me that this spawns such complicated discussion. I've always viewed it as faceted illumination is simpler, and smoothed is a step further, requires additional code and computing or whatever. I remember modeling in Milkshape3D on my old Pentium 200mhz and having to use flatshaded because the smoothed rendering was too slow.

Yes, I'd prefer if LH or someone else on the team simply reinstated or added this, it can't possibly be a hard thing to do :S

I didn't manage to find another cvar which did the same thing in DP.

, the image is even called flatshaded.jpg

I'd obviously want it to still be textured just like normally. Flatshaded doesn't have to mean vertex-colored or whatever.

[Sajt]

The way hardware rendering works (using vertex arrays) is, understandably, not built with fast flat-shading in mind.

A triangle is defined as three vertex indices. A vertex can have attributes such as position, colour, normal, etc. The triangle cannot contain separate "vertex position" and "vertex colour" indices. When you run a shader, first the vertices are set up, then the fragment shader is run interpolating vertex values across triangles. It's not set up for "triangle attributes".

The only way it could be implemented on the engine would be:
- To split the vertices up at load-time, the same thing that an offline model tool would do, resulting in 3x as many vertices as triangles.
- Draw models not using vertex arrays, which is much slower.
- Possibly some complicated shader trick which could hack in "triangle attributes", but at the cost of speed (both batching overhead and fillrate would suffer).
- Maybe there is some brand-new feature in DX10 or DX11 which allows triangles to have indices to different attributes? I don't know if it would be worth it, if they did...

The fastest solution is the brutest: to give each triangle its very own vertices. Even if those vertices are in the same position as other triangles' vertices, they can have different colour/normal attributes. Yes, you end up with more vertices than you think you should need, but flat-shaded games are usually low-poly anyway so it shouldn't matter.

[Sajt]

Urre, try this pre-release version of FixMDL. It has a "facetize" feature which should work. Although I haven't tested it much (that is, more than once, right before uploading).

[Urre]

Seems to work great, thanks! Not sure if I like the effect enough though.

[Sajt]

[Downsider]

[Urre]

[leileilol]

[Urre]

[Sajt]

To tell you the truth, I had planned for an edge-faceting feature in the QWalk model viewer. You would be able to just select and deselect edges with the mouse to make them sharp or smooth. It would not be difficult (still a day's work though), you don't need any UI or 2D views. But I'm kind of sick of this sort of thing by now...

[Urre]

[Sajt]