Further increasing the creative power at developers’ fingertips, Crytek today announced the arrival of a feature-filled update to its award-winning game development solution, CryENGINE 3. The CryENGINE 3 SDK now presents users with brand new tools to tap into, including revamped DirectX 11 tessellation, advanced character rendering options, improved AI system and much more.
Among the key enhancements free CryENGINE 3 SDK users can look forward to in version 3.4 are:
- Revamped DirectX 11 Tessellation
DX11 support and tessellation has come a long way since Crysis 2. Phong, PN triangles and displacement maps, along with no need for pre-tessellated assets, makes CryENGINE’s DX11 support among the best in the industry.
- Multi-layer Navigation Mesh
The multi-layer navigation is a powerful new and easy-to-use navigation system that AI agents utilize to path-find through game maps.
- Improved Skin Rendering and Eye Shader
New scattering approach gives more realistic rendering with fewer artifacts. New settings, checkboxes and sliders for things like oiliness, iris control, colors, pupil dilatation, tessellation and parallax support make CryENGINE character rendering more advanced and customizable than ever before.
- Advanced/Improved/Extended Glass Shader
The glass shader is a specialized tool for rendering glass-based surfaces. It can represent a wide range of glass types, including regular windows, stained glass, leaded glass, beveled glass, some crystal types and some types of transparent plastics as well. The improved glass shader now also boasts features such as a dirt layer designed to produce extremely realistic-looking glass surfaces complete with dust and dirt, differential fog and refraction blur.
On top of these key updates, version 3.4 of the free CryENGINE 3 SDK addresses a number of bugs from previous releases and gives developers access to further improvements that include:
- Improved glass rendering
- Geometric light beams
- Point light shafts
- Time of day based filmic HDR tone mapping
- Curves and key tangents for time of day
- User controlled per cascade shadow bias through time of day
- Improved transitions between levels of detail
- Volumetric fog features extended and improved
- Improved distance cloud shading
18th April 2012
So how does a blind person use an iPhone. Here’s how.
Source: http://www.stephenwildish.co.uk/friday.html
Pancake Venn Diagram @neatorama.com
Late in his life, Claude Monet developed cataracts. As his lenses degraded, they blocked parts of the visible spectrum, and the colours he perceived grew muddy. Monet’s cataracts left him struggling to paint; he complained to friends that he felt as if he saw everything in a fog. After years of failed treatments, he agreed at age 82 to have the lens of his left eye completely removed. Light could now stream through the opening unimpeded. Monet could now see familiar colours again. And he could also see colours he had never seen before. Monet began to see–and to paint–in ultraviolet.
[…] With his lens removed, Monet continued to paint. Flowers remained one of his favorite subjects. Only now the flowers were different. When most people look at water lily flowers, they appear white. After his cataract surgery, Monet’s blue-tuned pigments could grab some of the UV light bouncing off of the petals. He started to paint the flowers a whitish-blue.
The flight deck of Discovery, is shown in a 2.74-gigapixel, zoomable image—equivalent in resolution to about 340 pictures taken with an 8-megapixel iPhone camera.
In keeping with the latest vintage camera fad, the old-school look of the Canon Retro Cinema by Maxim Mezentsev & Aleksandr Suhih is merely a disguise. Inspired by cinemas of the 60s & 70s, it’s sure to catch the attention of hipsters everywhere.
Designers: Maxim Mezentsev & Aleksandr Suhih
Canon Retro Cinema by Maxim Mezentsev & Aleksandr Suhih » Yanko Design @yankodesign.com
Absolutely mesmerizing slow-motion short film about Holi, the Hindu festival of colors celebrating the beginning of spring, from production studio Variable – a fine addition to this omnibus of extraordinary super-slow-motion footage.
Reblogged From explore-blog
Notes: 98
Dirty Projectors, a haunting and unique track with lots of emotion and and really classic feel.
(Source: Spotify)
The battle to dominate your eyes is about to get ugly. Eyewear experts Oakleyannounced that it’s working on glasses with built-in smartphone features. Sounds like ploy to turn attention away from Google’s Project Glass AR glasses to us.
Oakley will challenge Project Glass with its own HUD eyewear | DVICE @dvice.com
![One of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble photos at 4000 x 3200 shows a stellar nursary.
Other photographs released today include gorgeous close-up images of specific features within 30 Doradus and an annotated map of the Nebula that highlights notable stars, galaxies and cosmic clouds that can be seen in the photograph.
For more info visit the ESA’s Hubble site, where you’ll find some very, very hi-res versions of these photographs that are definitely worth checking out. [30 Doradus | Close-up images |Annotated Map]](http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/images/publicationjpg/heic1206a.jpg)
One of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble photos at 4000 x 3200 shows a stellar nursary.
Other photographs released today include gorgeous close-up images of specific features within 30 Doradus and an annotated map of the Nebula that highlights notable stars, galaxies and cosmic clouds that can be seen in the photograph.
For more info visit the ESA’s Hubble site, where you’ll find some very, very hi-res versions of these photographs that are definitely worth checking out. [30 Doradus | Close-up images |Annotated Map]
