OpenTK Tutorial 9 Part 3: Specular Maps and Attenuation

In the previous part of this tutorial, we added spot lights and directional lights. This time, we're adding specular maps and light attenuation.

OpenTK Tutorial 9 Part 2: New Light Types (Spot and Directional)

In the first part of this tutorial, we made it possible to use more than one light in a scene. In this part of the tutorial, we'll be adding two new light types.

The next (and final) part of this tutorial will add specular mapping and attenuation.

OpenTK Tutorial 9 Part 1: Multiple Lights

This will be the first part of our more advanced lighting arc. In this part, we'll allow the scene to have many lights instead of just one.

This next part will add two new types of light: spot lights that only shine in a limited cone, and directional lights that shine at a constant angle on the whole scene. A third part will add specular maps and attenuation, to make the lighting look a little more realistic.

Detecting Markov Bots on Reddit, my lazy way

I've been getting annoyed at the number of comment bots on Reddit that are clearly just a program running a Markov chain. If you're not familiar with Markov chains, the basic explanation is that it looks at all the comments and makes a list of what words came directly after what other words, and then goes through the list to find a string of words where each pair was found in that order in the real comments. There are other ones that use larger portions of the text and ones that could use more than just the comments on one post, but the Reddit bots don't seem to be those (Wikipedia has an article with a far better explaination about Markov chains). Sometimes this makes a decent looking comment, but other times it just makes gibberish. There's a whole subreddit, /r/subredditsimulator, where the only posters allowed are Markov chain bots trained on other subreddits. That's the only place I'd like to see them.

Update on Next Tutorial

I wanted to give everyone an update on the next tutorial, since it's been a while.

As you can see in the pictures, there's multiple lights at once, specular maps (look at the difference between the land and ocean), and spot lights. This code also includes directional lighting, but I think it didn't make the pictures.

I'm sorry to let this take so long. Life has been busy, but it should be less busy relatively soon.

The other problem has been trying to break this tutorial up into manageable chunks. I may have to switch to making it into an annotated example project instead of a tutorial (which might be better overall, and would let me make more content). Feel free to leave comments if you have any feelings about this (and I know some people have asked for that sort of change in the past).

OpenTK Tutorial 8 Part 2: Adding Textures and Specular Lighting

In the first part of this tutorial, we added normals. In this tutorial, we'll use them to do something interesting, adding specular lighting and diffuse maps.

OpenTK Tutorial 8 Part 1: Normals, Materials, and Loading More From Files

In the previous tutorial, we loaded a simple object in from a file. Right now, it's hard to see the detail in the models because they're all one color (or have a texture applied wrong). By the end of this tutorial (that is, after the second part), we'll have diffuse lighting with specular highlights on our models, making them look much nicer.

This part will cover loading texture coordinates and normals from a file, calculating normals for geometry that doesn't come with them (such as shapes we're generating through code) and loading basic materials from a file.

(UPDATED 2015-11-24 to fix some issues with loading normals from a file)

(UPDATED 2015-12-16 to make the MTL file have materials that look nicer under lighting)

(UPDATED 2018-11-06 to make compatible with input handling changes in Tutorial 5)