Graphics Write-Up #8

This weeks assignment was one of the easiest we've had in a while, which was nice.  Changing the Maya exporter was just a matter of seeing how the normals were done and then doing the same thing for the tangents and bitangents.  Of course, changing that meant the MeshBuilder had to change, but that was a simple fix to how the data was read in, after that all the binary code didn't need any modifications since it's all just more vertex data.

Writing the new shaders also wasn't bad since it was just reading in the new values and modifying the normal based off of them.  The most time intensive part of this assignment was simply making all the new files and loading them into the Lua file so that they're copied.

This was easily the most visually impressive task we've done yet, the normal mapping looks really awesome.

Here's what it looks like with normal mapping!  The left cube is with specular lighting, although you can't really tell with this screenshot.

Link to code:  http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jthummel/graphics/ThummelGraphicsAssignment8.zip