A few months back I came across a rather interesting paper on generating radiosity lightmaps (Radiosity on Graphics Hardware). The reason I found it so interesting is because it uses quite clever techniques to do nearly all of the radiosity calculations on the GPU. So, I decided to give it a go
I made some decent early progress implementing it, but then took some time out to do some terrain work with XNA and was also working on a DBP entry. With those out of the way (or cancelled ) I was free to return to my radiosity
It is written in C++ (mainly to prove that C# hasn't made me soft ) using DirectX 9 and it has actually been loads of fun, especially optimizing it. I was able to reduce the time it takes to perform 256 (16x16) hemicube shots/emissions from nearly a minute, down to as little as 1.5 seconds
On a whole though it is still not blisteringly fast (the screenshot took quite a while to render), as to get a decent level of accuracy, I have to increase the resolution of the hemicube as well as the resolution of the textures. I also have to shoot residual energy from the topmost mipmap level, as shooting from a lower mipmap level can produce some nasty artifacts
As you can see from the screenshot, I am still not completely free from artifacts (even when running on quite a high level of detail) but I am still working on it (I did say Beta right? ) The most notable artifacts are around the base of the rotated boxes, where the luxel's centre is occluded and so fails the visibility test, even though the luxel itself is partially visible. I will probably be able to fill those in as a post-process on the lightmaps when packing them, but I am not sure yet if that will work
Anyway, you can expect to see more of this as it progresses (I'll be giving this project it's own page on my site shortly)
I got a very pleasant surprise today as my folks got me a Wii for my birthday
The Wii is a really amazing little machine and I was blown away by it having WiFi out of the box (couple of settings changes and it connects to my router no problems). It is kind of funny seeing it sitting beside my 360 as the Wii really is so small
I've been having a blast all day on the Wii sports and haven't even unwrapped Red Steel yet. The urge to go buy Zelda: Twilight Princess is proving ridiculously difficult to resist, but I know if I get it, productivity will nosedive to zero for weeks to come
In other news, I have decided to not enter the DreamBuildPlay competition. I actually decided this towards the end of last month but didn't say anything. The reasons are quite simply I don't think I have enough time left to finish a well polished game and the usual lack of content comes into play
I have been working on something else a little bit special though, but more on that when I have pretty screenshots to show-off
Posted - 5/20/2007 4:10:42 PM
) I was free to return to my radiosity 
Posted - 5/13/2007 10:45:09 AM