GBuffer.net

Looks like this blog is now being updated bi-annually. The last year or so has been quite a busy time for me. I’ve been updating my core skills. One of my main targets was to get my head round to understanding a global illumination technique that everyone seems to love so much these days – spherical harmonic lighting. It took some time for me to get my head around the math, and even more time for me to find the spare time to make an implementation. Click here to go to the page with details on the implementation and a link to the full source code. As with a lot of things, once I understood what was being done, it all looked quite simple and straight forward. With that being said, I must say I still can’t claim to be an expert on the subject, but as I time goes by I hope to continue to improve upon it as the need arises.

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… 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