One technique I discovered early on is ambient lighting using a texture cube. A texture cube is a texture made up of 6 images, one for each side of a cube, that should smoothly fit together to make a complete panorama.

Rather than use this texture cube just as a skybox, I use it to sample ambient lighting.

Texturecube ambient lighting

The other nice thing about using a texture cube is you can quickly blend them together to subtly alter the lighting or smoothly transition from sunset to night.

This technique works well in conjunction with an Ambient Occlusion layer in your shader, as you don’t have to have overwhelming fixed lighting when baking your model’s textures out.

Getting closer to being done. Still plenty of bugs to fix and small features to implement. Decent normal convolutions are a big priority.

I’m quite pleased with how different the water looks at different depths, angles and proximities.

The new water shader is a work in progress, but already looks the part.

I accidentally clipped the terrain while I was working on masking out the cel shading under the water. You can see how the cel shading applies itself to the terrain quite clearly in this shot.

The primary mode of transport in the Rugged world is a sexy, growling ATV. You can also see the new haze shader in the background.

The new lighting model is so good that the vehicles glow under the hot desert sun and all have to be re-rendered. Until then, here’s a look at Rugged’s title screen.

Here’s a couple more shots of the shader progress. The slope texture is now quite visible, as is the full-size normal map.

Big terrain updates. The game engine can now have vast swathes of land and will even subdivide nearer terrain to remove sharp polygon edges and raise the detail.

This update also includes my first shader, as seen below. Don’t forget to click through to the high res version.