Tip of the day

Nope, no engine updates today. Instead I'll give you a website recommendation.

If you're a bit weird like me, that is, you rather read graphics papers than fiction before you go to sleep, you probably already have this one in your bookmarks.

Ke-Sen Huang keeps an index of all papers available online from every academic graphics conference worth it's name.

I'm yet to find a good rescource that lists all papers and presentations from more commercially oriented conferences like GDC. Feel free to share your own bookmarks :)

Soft shadows

I've added soft shadows to the engine. I use Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS), described in this paper. It differs from regular PCF in that a "blocker-serach" step is used to approximate a shadow penumbra size. The estimated penumbra size is then used to control the filter size. It's not real penumbra shadows but it looks quite convincing.

Believe it or not, but until now my engine had no support for normal mapping. Now it does. The dynamic indirect lighting is also affected by the normal maps.
Time for the screenshots:

Note the green light that is reflected from the wall (not visible) onto the scene.

Soft shadows.

The scene is also lit by an enviroment map.

Dynamic indirect lighting

I got the indirect lighting to work correctly. There were some stupid bugs in my SH code. In the screenshots I use a 3x3x3 grid of sampling points (see last post) and one bonce of indirect light. There is also a (very) small constant ambient term so that no surfaces are completely black. Combined with SSAO it looks quite nice.

The scene is simple and HDR is deactivated so that the lighting effects is more apparent.

I've been quite busy with the engine lately. The new stuff is:

Dynamic reflections
Each reflective object has it's own cube enviroment map. I support multiple bounces by spreading out the cube map updates over a number of frames. This means there can be some subtle "popping" in the reflections. Acceptable for my application.

HDR pipeline
I now support 64 or 128 bit HDR rendering. Pretty standard stuff where I do tone mapping based on image luminance. Of course there is also a bloom filter (as if we're not tired of that one by now;))

Antialiasing
One of the biggest drawbacks with deferred shading is the lack of support for multisample antialias (at least with DX9). The usual thing to do is to hack antialias by performing an edge detection filter and blurring the image only on the edges. It's a dirty hack but it works quite well.

Dynamic indirect illumination
This is a variant of this paper. In short, I partition the world into a uniform grid, and at each grid point I capture the incident radiance field. This is done by rendering a cube map and then projecting it to spherical harmonics coefficients. The coefficients are stored in a number of volume textures. When rendering the frame, SH cofficients representing the incident radiance at each pixel are fetched from the volume texture and used to approximate the incident diffuse lighting at each pixel.

Right now there are some problems with my implementation but I'll solve that soon ;)

At last, the mandotary screenshot: