Since the technical details of Avatars on the XBox360 with XNA FX/Game Studio 3.1, there has been a fair bit of verbal turbulence regarding integration into existing projects/rendering engines. The main gripe people have with it is the forced, hard coded effect. This is basically a single directional rim light effect. You cannot render it directly with your own effect. This means you cannot create a really unique look easily, not can you render the avatar directly to a floating point texture as depth for shadow mapping or post-process effect like depth of field or SSAO.

However there is workaround. Take a look at this for example (Click for larger image):



This shows shadow mapping. No not some obscure projection trick, real shadow mapping. While I am not going to disclose the method for achieving this in this web log post (the image has some big hints), I may release the method as an article (probably on Ziggyware) in the near future. Bye for now.

It has been a long time since I last posted a blog entry. Quite a few things have happened since then.

The first is, I am out of a permanent position. I am currently undertaking small contracting jobs to try and stay afloat.
I currently have one lined up for a couple of months, but I am always on the lookout for more. If you are looking for
a C#/XNA developer with rendering expertise and commercial experience, let me know.

The second bit of new news is a baby. His name is Andrei James Coles, born June 2nd at 3.2KG.

I finally took the Core i7 plunge as my Core 2 Duo and DDR2 were starting to show their age.

 I ended up going for an Asus Rampage II Extreme Mainboard, 6GB Mushkin Triple Channel DDR3 1600mhz, Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem, Corsair HX1000W PSU, Noctua U12P SE1366HSF, and 2 x WD 300GB 10KRPM Velociraptors in Raid0.