The adventures of building a web renderer

[Lasse Deleuran]

It has become time to throw all the performance improvements out the window and create a more realistic renderer.

At first I simply copied some sample files to get started... the result is not quite there yet:



By turning the 'metalness' effect off for the parts that are standard color, you can see that the edges have all become rounded:


In order to only have the intended edges rounded, I dug up some old wisdom from this forum: "Only round the edges without hard lines of type 2".

This is the result when doing so:


This makes all the edges soft since all vertices (corners) are also being used by the hard lines!

Second attempt was to use optional lines (line type 5) to indicate that a vertex should appear "soft":


Zooming in on the long sloped piece shows us some failures:


Third attempt was to use conditional lines to mark soft edges instead of soft vertices:


This seems to do the trick.

And turning on environment map helps the chrome fuel cap become better lit:


I am currently satisfied with how edges are shown. Now the work continues to the surfaces which have to be more realistic. Textures, bump maps, lights, shadows and more to come!