January 20, 2005
Dear reader, i need your help (badly). I've been working on more nebulaes stuff, and i can't decide which blending type results in the more realistic / nicest nebulaes.
First of all: a nebula with alpha-blending:
The same nebula but with additive-blending (and a slightly different viewpoint):
And for …
First of all: a nebula with alpha-blending:
The same nebula but with additive-blending (and a slightly different viewpoint):
And for …
January 19, 2005
As promised, here are some screenshots of my first fully volumetric nebula. It is shaded by spawning some stars randomly in the volume, and summing up for each particle of the nebula gaz all the contributions of the nearest stars (distance to star, angles colors).
Next step is to add a bit more deta…
Next step is to add a bit more deta…
January 13, 2005
Recently i've been playing with procedural generation of a volumetric galaxy (no less!). For this i decomposed the task into 3 parts:
1. Generating a background starfield.
2. Generating a volumetric galaxy (made of particles, so that you can "fly" into it)
3. Generating nebulas.
1. Generating a backgro…
December 09, 2004
Time for a small update.
I spent the last weeks working on version 2 of my planet engine. At the moment i'm only working on the geometric part of it. No eye-candy: no real lighting, no textures, no particles, no additional effect.. only the spherical terrain engine.
You can view a video here:
http://w…
I spent the last weeks working on version 2 of my planet engine. At the moment i'm only working on the geometric part of it. No eye-candy: no real lighting, no textures, no particles, no additional effect.. only the spherical terrain engine.
You can view a video here:
http://w…
October 30, 2004
The latest demo of Minas Tirith is available now:
MT4 Demo.
Hold CTRL for slower movement or SHIFT for faster movement. Arrows to move, mouse to look around, ESCAPE to quit.
You can see a place with a lot of textured books in the library (it's the only "textured" part of the scene).. but i'm not going…
MT4 Demo.
Hold CTRL for slower movement or SHIFT for faster movement. Arrows to move, mouse to look around, ESCAPE to quit.
You can see a place with a lot of textured books in the library (it's the only "textured" part of the scene).. but i'm not going…
October 19, 2004
A few months ago i posted a thread in the lounge about a project started by a group of artists on cgtalk, to model the whole city of Minas Tirith from the Lord or the Rings, in 3D. I'm helping them with a small real-time model viewer, whose next version will be available in a few days.
The Minas Tir…
The Minas Tir…
September 18, 2004
These last days i've been reviewing the scene graph part of my engine. I have a few goals in mind:
1. Separation between the scene graph data, and the scene graph renderer. That's probably the main thing missing in 95% of the scene graphs out here. Exemple: NVidia recently released NVSG. I had a loo…
1. Separation between the scene graph data, and the scene graph renderer. That's probably the main thing missing in 95% of the scene graphs out here. Exemple: NVidia recently released NVSG. I had a loo…
September 13, 2004
This week end and today, i worked quite intensively on rayleigh and mie scattering to color my sky. I took my courage and read all the academic papers on the topic. ATI's paper: Rendering Outdoor Light Scattering in Realtime is still my reference for my implementation (especially because it doesn't…
September 08, 2004
First thing: a few days ago i discovered a potential bug in ATI's OpenGL drivers (catalyst 4.8). If anybody is aware of it (i reported it to ATI's devrel's, but got no reply yet), please post a message to confirm it.
It happens when you create a PBuffer; after creating the rendering context, you cal…
It happens when you create a PBuffer; after creating the rendering context, you cal…
September 05, 2004
Today i read again, after many months, about the theory of Rayleigh and Mie scattering, to properly shade my sky.
I did a first implementation following ATI's white paper around a year ago. The results ended up looking pretty good, as you can see on my old engine's page. I had troubles (and so do ma…
I did a first implementation following ATI's white paper around a year ago. The results ended up looking pretty good, as you can see on my old engine's page. I had troubles (and so do ma…
September 03, 2004
I think i will be done with the "step 1" of my clouds this week end. I will soon be ready to work on "step 2", integration at the full planet level.
At the moment the clouds are still unanimated and cover an area of 153x153 kilometers (i'm tiling a 16x16 grid of clouds, each voxel space is around 10…
At the moment the clouds are still unanimated and cover an area of 153x153 kilometers (i'm tiling a 16x16 grid of clouds, each voxel space is around 10…
September 02, 2004
The impostors manager is now working well. I have also implemented a priority queue, to update "close" impostors more often than far away ones. It's pretty much flawless as long as you don't move too quickly (= at no more than Mach 10).
I have added a save/load feature to my clouds generator, so now…
September 01, 2004
I did a small benchmark of my particle system - the one used for rendering clouds to impostors, or rendering the brute-force voxel space as particles. Keep in mind this is on a Radeon 9700.
When fillrate is not a concern, i get around 15 million particles per second. A vertex shader is used to align…
When fillrate is not a concern, i get around 15 million particles per second. A vertex shader is used to align…
September 01, 2004
I didn't have a lot of free time today, but i still managed to implement the impostor cache, with variable resolution depending on the impostor distance. So now, clouds far in the back are getting a 64x64 texture, and closer clouds are getting textures up to 512x512.
Here is a screenie:
Here is a screenie:
August 31, 2004
My impostor manager is now written and seems to work pretty well. It still does not handle changes of resolution, so all my impostors textures have the same size - 256x256. I implemented particles billboarding via a vertex shader and performance is now "okay" - when you're not flying inside the clo…
August 30, 2004
I finally fixed the impostor bug. The formula i used was wrong, i was not calculating the frustum field of view angle correctly. It was a bit tricky to understand why, but revising my trigonometry helped a bit. For those interesting, the code looks like this: for a viewer position located at ViewPo…
August 29, 2004
I am currently working on the implementation of impostors for my clouds. The goal is to display multiple voxel grids seamlessly and not just one as i had before. I'm still wondering how the impostors interface should like, as i want to be reusable in my parts of my engine. A still have a small bug …
August 28, 2004
Haven't done much today. For some reason i have some troubles keeping my concentration during week end afternoons. Watched TV a bit, a few series - 24, Stargate SG1, etc.. and played with my clouds shading code. The shading when the viewer is under the clouds is now near perfect, and looking very r…
August 26, 2004
I have improved the shading, especially in two areas:
1. Brightness: i noticed that clouds, even directly lit by sunlight, were still a bit gray. The cause was the smoothing of normals: normals of voxels inside the cloud can basically point in any direction. Smoothing the values with these normals c…
1. Brightness: i noticed that clouds, even directly lit by sunlight, were still a bit gray. The cause was the smoothing of normals: normals of voxels inside the cloud can basically point in any direction. Smoothing the values with these normals c…
August 25, 2004
Today i played a bit with shading, as i was not happy with the shading i (quickly) implemented yesterday.
Shading in a cloud is a complex topic - it's normally viewpoint dependant - and involves casting multiple rays inside the fog volume to calculate the scattering. As the sun will be moving in rea…
Shading in a cloud is a complex topic - it's normally viewpoint dependant - and involves casting multiple rays inside the fog volume to calculate the scattering. As the sun will be moving in rea…
August 24, 2004
First topic: volumetric clouds.
I recently talked a lot with Sean O Neil (check out his website) and Lutz Justen (his website) about planet and clouds rendering. Lutz has some impressive satellite views of Earth, but he's just using textures - if you zoom at low altitudes, you will see it's only a f…
I recently talked a lot with Sean O Neil (check out his website) and Lutz Justen (his website) about planet and clouds rendering. Lutz has some impressive satellite views of Earth, but he's just using textures - if you zoom at low altitudes, you will see it's only a f…
August 24, 2004
Greetings. As a few of you already know, i'm working on a planet renderer. I worked quite intensively on the terrain engine last year (you can see some videos and screenshots on my website). I will use this journal to show my progress in the development of this engine, which i called the Infinity e…
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