This was to show the use of lighting, reflections in the window, and shadowing that I applied to my scene. You can clearly see the effects of a lit environment in the far back column enclosure, the use of bump mapping really brings of the tectures.
Bump mapping works by applying a normal map layer that exposes the normals over a normal texture, normals are a direction in which the vectors describing a surface are facing, a normal exposes vectors on a texture by texture basis. This helps to increase detail in environments. Bump mapping can also be called "Dot3 Bump Mapping" for more information regarding bump mapping see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping
or any book on 3D Computer Graphics. When the light shines upon these surfaces however, we get the simulated effects of dents and bumps. This works well for added realism and a very low cost, this also means that we can make something look more detailed without the need to increase polygon count, with effects like Tesselation.
This video is one of the sample videos I took, a few seconds preview of the development build of my environment for the web shot. Unfortnatly this didn't get placed on the actual showcase advertisement for unknown reasons. This is textured, with atmosheric lighting and effects a new sky has been placed in. Unfortnatly the skylight used in this scene is removed in the final cut, skylights add a huge amount of time onto a frames render, once removed, we shaved off around 10 minutes of render time, a huge increase. This is one of the unfortnate comprimises that have to be made to meet the 10th May Deadline.
One thing I do wish to note, even though I mentioned I didn't want to describe lighting effects, is the volumetric lighting from the main windows. This is a great effect that was easy to achieve. Instead of using omni lighting, would fire light in all directions, I required a more direct light, I used a directional lighting effect, applying volumetrics and increased the general intensity, this worked really well for my scene.
Comparing the effect and the darkness I am trying to apply to the inspritation game of my choice, the video here for Amnesia, a few seconds in, depicts a darkend environment where the only lighting is the volumetric light coming from the windows.
I think my lighting effect with directional volumetrics looks in anything very much the same as the one used here, minus lining up and some of the dust particle effects, which I would't have minded adding myself if not for the actual limit I have on time.
It's probably safe to say that I lied about the above comment on not mentioning lighting, lighting is key to the ambience of my particular environment, and you probably noticed the lighting that was applied over the face of the building, like a search light, that is one of my shameless self promotions, pause the video, the light actual displays the Cybertronix logo, the logo of our team. I got the idea from the Batman series and of course, the use of a search light works absolutely well to depict a unusual way of displaying our team logo in the scene.
The bat logo did this well, originally I was going to have it in the sky with some dynamic clouding. However, due to that lack of a true skybox, because of how akward it worked with lighting, the use of an actually sky logo wouldn't have worked, with no collision for the lighting to shine on, so I decided to use it like a search light instead, which proved to be more beneficial.
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