P3D Default Shaders

[rdb]

That’s a lot of questions in one post. I’ll respond inline.

@chitondihk

• real-time shadows (on a larger scale)

The built-in shadow system has only improved in that it now supports point lights in the latest master. However, writing custom shaders for shadow mapping has become significantly easier due to Panda being able to set up the shadow mapping and provide shadow maps and coordinates to the shaders automatically.

@chitondihk

• volumetric lighting (that works)

There is a filter for volumetric lighting, and it has not changed since 1.8.

@chitondihk

• controlled Anti-aliasing (that works)
• bloom effect that doesn’t destroy Anti-aliasing (this one is forgiven)

Multisample antialiasing is supported, even for buffers, and various bugs were fixed that prevented this from working.

@chitondihk

• controlled blur effect (instead of entire scene only)

Not without writing your own shaders.

@chitondihk

What about fps…? Has the new engine build improved fps or made it worst (given the new overhead)?

It has improved overall. We keep finding new opportunities to make Panda faster.

@chitondihk

As someone who works with cross-platforming APIs (for apps ), I know asking P3D to have android and IOS support is asking too much since that would basically require an entire re-write of the engine (with java as the basis),

It would not require an entire rewrite. There are proof-of-concept ports for Android or iOS, but neither is getting the attention they deserve.

There is also an experimental WebGL port which works fine on my Android phone.

@chitondihk

Vertex transforms…

Has that been moved to the graphic card side yet or are CPUs still being put in a strain with it? The graphic card really should handle that for performance reasons. I was actually looking for an Engine Specifications page at panda3d.org but didn’t see one, so that’s why I started this topic, to get some answers.

In 1.10, hardware skinning is now supported out of the box. From 1.9.1 and above we also make it easy for people to implement it in their own shaders. See:

Hardware Skinning

EDIT: Now also supported in the automatic shader generator. To enable it, you need these settings: hardware-animated-vertices true basic-shaders-only false You also need to call setShaderAuto() on the actor in question. The Cg and Shader Generator support will be 1.10.0 and above. I’ve backported the GLSL p3d_TransformTable support to 1.9.1 by user request. Hi all, I just checked in a change today that makes it more straightforward to implement skeleton animation in a shader using the exis…

I agree that the focus going forward should be on providing good shaders out of the box. One of my top priorities is to move towards providing physically based rendering out of the box. 1.9 was a big step in the right direction.

That said, if you want a configuration of Panda that has great PBR shaders, ambient occlusion, shadowing etc. by default, I heartily recommend that you check out the RenderPipeline, a modern physically based pipeline built on top of Panda3D:
github.com/tobspr/RenderPipeline