Vector Texture v1

Friday, March 27th, 2009

It’s been some time since anything technical has been posted here. Been spending my time building up a stronger base since the top seemed a little wobbly.

Got a new demo out today. It’s something that some people (including me) call vector textures. A very interesting technique that uses the existing texture resizing methods implemented on the GPU. These days it’s hard to find graphics techniques that manage really makes use of everything the GPU provides us with. What’s even nicer is that this technique could improve existing methods of rendering things like text and could even be extended to rendering blades of grass or leaves on a tree where the possibility of zooming in to a leaf is very real.

Go ahead, read more about it and download the demo here

Water you can swim in

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Water!!! Water you can swim in… Well only virtually :-) This is my very first graphical demo built on a excellent open source framework called G3D.

Demo is based on two chapters in the ShaderX book.
“Rendering Ocean Water”
by John Isidoro, Alex Vlachos, Chris Brennan
And
“Rippling Refractive and Reflective Water”
by Alex Vlachos, John Isidoro and Chris Oat

Features include

  1. Realtime vertex displacement
  2. Full control over speed, wave direction, amplitude and frequency
  3. Additional detailing via two normal maps
  4. Fake refractions that look real
  5. Real time reflections or reflections via environment maps
  6. Fully configurable water color via texture maps