MD2 Bump mapping viewer

Looking at animated models in the widespread MD2 (Quake 2) format i noticed they generally are very poor of details because of the limited number of polygons supported by this format. So i had the idea to use bump mapping to improve their detail. I wrote a little viewer for MD2 models rendered with a bump mapping effect. I used shaders written in HLSL using the shader model 2.0 for DirectX 9.0c. The only difficulty was on pre-computing tangents. In fact an MD2 animated model stores a vertex list for every key-frame of the animations. So is necessary to compute tangents for every key-frame. In a typical model there are hundreds of key-frames so this operation is very slow if it's done after loading the model. The solution is to pre-compute the tangents and store it in a separate file; in fact the md2 format does not support tangent data in the vertex format.

Features:

• Per-pixel diffuse and specular lighting model, implemented using shaders
• Pre-computed mesh normals,binormals,tangents for doing tangent-space per-pixel lighting
• Uses HLSL pixel and vertex shaders, version 2.0
• Use of specular per-pixel lighting permits more detail, even on low-poly models
• Supported OS: MS Windows 2000/XP
• Uses DirectX 9.0c API

download demo (6.57 MB)