Photoshop plug-in - Filter Forge

It’s great for procedural texture creation, as well as post FX processing (good for all of you photography buffs). Its resolution independent, creates seamless edges and has a simple to use node based editor for creating your own plug-ins. It also spits out separate diffuse maps, spec maps, normal maps, etc.; and can use HDRI light probes if desired.

You can also download user-created filters from an online library of 5,000+. Check out the samples to see what people are doing… Pretty astonishing! 

www.filterforge.com

Features
http://www.filterforge.com/features/

Online Filter Library
http://www.filterforge.com/filters/

Daily English Words

hairshirt
A self-imposed punishment or penance, as in I apologized a dozen times--do you want me to wear a hair shirt forever? This term, mentioned from the 13th century on, alludes to wearing a coarse, scratchy hair shirt, the practice of religious ascetics. Its figurative use dates from the mid-1800s.

Spherical Harmonic Lighting

Purpose of Spherical Harmonic Lighting

To generate realistic real-time rendering of 3D scenes. This is to render the global illumination of scenes lit by any type of area light sources.

Just for Low frequence

Based on compression theory, you will understand that SH does not cover high frequency signals.

Featuers in DirectX

DirectX(since 9.0) has support of SH.
I can generate SH coefficients as an off-line process, and compress results with CPCA. And the data can be used in DirectX or OpenGL.

Books & Papers

1. Advanced Lighting and Materials with Shaders ISBN:1-55622-292-0
2. "Spherical Harmonic Lighting: The Gritty Details" GDC 2003 Proceedings.
3. Monte Carlo Integration for ray tracying.

texture tech-->Normal map

What is Normal Mapping?

Normal-Mapping is a technique used to light a 3D model with a low polygon count as if it were a more detailed model. It does not actually add any detail to the geometry, so the edges of the model will still look the same, however the interior will look a lot like the high-res model used to generate the normal map. The RGB values of each texel in the the normal map represent the x,y,z components of the normalized mesh normal at that texel. Instead of using interpolated vertex normals to compute the lighting, the normals from the normal map texture are used

Tangent Space or Object Space

Normal can be saved directly as normal vector, or tangent and binormal along u/v directions in UV space.

Create Normal Map

Once you have a high-res and low-res model, you'll need something to generate the normal map.

What has to be down programatically is to cast a ray from each texel on the low-res model, find the ray's intersection with the high-res model, and save in a texture map the normal from the high-res model where the ray intersects.

ATI and NVidia have existing tools for normal map.

Use Normal map

In OpenGL

glTexEnvf (GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_COMBINE_EXT);
glTexEnvf (GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_COMBINE_RGB_EXT, GL_DOT3_RGBA_EXT);

glTexEnvf (GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_SOURCE0_RGB_EXT, GL_PRIMARY_COLOR_EXT);
glTexEnvf (GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_OPERAND0_RGB_EXT, GL_SRC_COLOR);

glTexEnvf (GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_SOURCE1_RGB_EXT, GL_TEXTURE);
glTexEnvf (GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_OPERAND1_RGB_EXT, GL_SRC_COLOR);

In HLSL

===============Vertex Shader===========================
void main(
float4 Pobject : POSITION,
float2 TexUV : TEXCOORD0,
float3 inL : COLOR0,
uniform float4x4 ModelViewProj,
uniform float3 lightPosOS, // OS = in Object Space
uniform float lQ, // Light intensity, for distance attenuation
uniform half3 lightColor,
out float4 HPosition : POSITION,
out half4 L : COLOR0,
out float2 uv : TEXCOORD0,
out half3 LV : TEXCOORD1 )
{
HPosition = mul(ModelViewProj, Pobject);
uv = TexUV;
LV.xyz = inL;
float d = distance( lightPosOS, Pobject );
L.xyz = lightColor * saturate ( 1.0 / (lQ * d * d) );
}
===============Pixel Shader===========================
//
// lColor = light color, uv = texture coordinates for normal map and diffuse map,
// LV = light vector, the ambientColor constant is set with cgGLSetParameter3fv.
//
half4 main(
half4 lColor : COLOR0,
half2 uv : TEXCOORD0,
half3 LV : TEXCOORD1,
uniform sampler2D diffuseMap : TEXUNIT0,
uniform sampler2D normalMap : TEXUNIT1,
uniform half3 ambientColor) : COLOR
{
half3 N = tex2D( normalMap, uv ).xyz * 2.0 -1.0;
half NdotL = saturate( dot(N, LV * 2.0 - 1.0) );
half3 C = saturate( lColor * NdotL + ambientColor ) * (half3)tex2D(diffuseMap, uv).xyz;
return half4(C, 1);
}

Happy New Year!

Best Wishes! What is your resolution of new year!

Welcome to the new decade!