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Thursday, May 6, 2010

Volume Rendering 202: Shadows and Translucency

Finally, here is the last sample on volume rendering. It’s only taking me a year to get around to finishing it. Is anyone even visiting this page anymore? I’d better post this for my sanity anyhow.
Last time I left you with some basic optimizations, one being a pseudo-empty space skipping. But as I noted, the volumes needed to be sorted in order for it to work completely. We sort the sub-volumes back to front with respect to distance to the camera. This insures that we have a smooth framerate no matter what angle the camera is at. A speedup we can do here is to only sort the volumes if the camera has moved 45 degrees since we last sorted.
So now our subvolumes are sorted w.r.t. the camera. But we have alpha blending artifacts because depending on the view, the pixels of the subvolumes are not drawn in the correct order. What we can do to fix this is to draw a depth only pass, and ensure that we only draw pixels that will contribute to the final image.

alpha_errors no_alpha_errors
Left: no depth prepass. Right: depth prepass

Translucency

The first sample includes an approximated translucency. It is far from realistic, but it gives fairly good results. The idea is very similar to depth mapping, compare the current pixels depth to that of the depth map, and either use this value to look up into a texture or perform an exponential falloff in the shader (the sample does the latter).

translucency

Shadows

There isn’t much to say here. The sample below uses variance shadow mapping.

shadow0 

shadow1



Well, there it is. Anticlimactic wasn't it?

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Ground control to Major Tom

Wow, it’s been over a year since the last post on volume rendering! I must sound like a broken record. Anyhow, I’ve had time to fix a couple of bugs with the last installment in the past couple of weeks and it should be coming online pretty soon.

So why have I been absent lately? Last spring I was recruited to work on American Sign Language teaching software for Purdue University. The project ranged from database implementation, to layered skeletal animation with additive blending support and facial animation, to creating a language and compiler for ASL scripts (Antlr was amazing for this). Also, our paper was accepted at SIGGRAPH in the Education section.

On top of that I accepted a job at Human Head Interactive in January as a tech programmer ( these ramblings actually paid off :) ). I’m really excited to be working with some smart and talented people. We have some cool rendering tech – thanks to our lead graphics programmer – and pretty slick game play ideas.

Also, sorry to anyone who has commented on a post and it hasn't been posted, I've been spammed by bots for awhile now.