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PART 6 - CURVES PART 1

Welcome to the first phong shading tutorial :)  If you're wondering what phong shading is all about then you may well be interested to read on...

YOU WHAT?

Phong shading sounds daunting, but with a little explanation its really quite straight forward. 

You may have noticed in some of the latest bagman maps that some of the shapes appear curved.  Now, this thing is as you may know, Kingpin doesn't support curved surfaces.  This leaves you wondering how it is something can look ultra curved without it actually being curved.  A classic when is a 'brick not a brick?'.  Only of course this case it's when is a curve not a curve.  The answer of course is that a curve can look like a curve, yet not actually be a curve when it is phong shaded. 

I'm sure I'm still making no sense what so ever, so let me explain this a bit.  When you want to make a curve you have to angle the required faces or position wedges together to produce a multi sided shape.  Just a curve made of straight lines.  The problem with this is it looks very jagged and ugly.  Not a curve. 

What phong shading does is make sure that the shading on each of the faces is not too different, so that a curve will appear smoothly shaded.

Other Tricks Of The Eye      

Of course if you want to have some really good looking curved surfaces in your map you will have to do more than just use phong shading.   You can take advantage of the fact that the eye can be 'lead' around a shape.   If you took a big square box, crushed the corners in a bit so it looked a bit roundish then took it 50 meters down the road and painted a circle on it close to the edges then stepped back it would look more curved than if it didn't have the circle painted on it.  Yes I know that was a bad example, sorry :-p

How you can apply this to Kingpin mapping is most relevant to making arches.  If you make an arch and then use texture with a curve that follows the contours of your arch in it around your arch then it will look more curved.  This is just a trick of the eye.  Of course if you can make your won textures all the better. 

In the next tutorial I'll explain how to put all this into practice and the best ways to physically make the brushes needed for these techniques.

NOTE:  Thanks to KungFu for pointing out an error in the tutorial.  Why not visit his site at http://ww.poisonville.com/ :)

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This page was last updated on Thursday, September 30, 1999 at 02:55PM EDT.