Hello,

I am about to finish my bachelors degree and have taken undergraduate comptuer graphics classes to get in touch with rendering photorealistic scenes in realtime. Unfortunately, the course only covered the most basic stuff. I would like to get to know state of the art algorithms in the following fields:

- water rendering

- tessellation

- volumetric rendering

- global illumination

- SSAO

I have checked a couple books but they seem to be behind in terms of techniques. Does anyone have a tip on how to get to know how these things work? My goal is to render a good looking small scenery with water and foliage, rocks.

Mostly the thing to do is simply Google the topics and read the papers that come up. You'll usually get a mix of SIGGRAPH papers, NV/AMD slides, and GDC talks from game developers. You ahould also look at all of the SIGGRAPH proceedings for the last couple years, especially the courses on physically based shading.

Thanks, appreciate your answer.

I recommend Nvidia's GPU Gems:

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_part01.html