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A trip down (video game) memory lane
This morning I was reminiscing with some colleagues about the golden age of the Amiga, and casually brought up some anecdotes about stuff I had written for it. After some poking I dug up my only surviving artefact from that era: Blaze, a platform game inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog, which I had…
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Particle file format
One of the problems plaguing the distributed version of Illumina PRT is that of resource management. Precisely, when multiple task groups are running concurrently, switching resources from one task group to another can be a great time sink. A PE’s current data set (geometry, acceleration structures, textures, etc) has to…
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An update long due
These last weeks I was working on optimising the Interactive Global Illumination (IGI) integrator for Illumina. The implementation uses a technique known as interleaved-sampling, where the image space is divided into square regions, usually of 3×3 or 4×4 pixels, and the rays shot from the viewer through each pixel of the grid…
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Image-based Lighting
In the last few days I’ve been working on integrating image-based lighting into the Illumina renderer. At the moment, I have a preliminary setup running on light probes from low-dynamic range (LDR) images. The light probes are sampled using a simple cosine-weighted distribution which is far from optimal. In fact, when…
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Scene script files
I have finally added a means of loading scene scripts into the renderer… generated a render of Sponza to celebrate!
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Illumina PRT – A distributed physically-based renderer
In the last couple of months I’ve been doing some work on a cross-platform distributed renderer, Illumina PRT. The renderer is still in its infancy and requires a substantial amount of work before it can be called decent by any standard. Hopefully I’ll be documenting any progress made in the…
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Sandbox applications
For the last few days we’ve all been working on wrapping up the projects and writing the dissertations which are due in three weeks’ time. I have created an application object for Vistas, allowing users to create and set up applications easily and quickly. Consequently I built a basic sandbox…
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Final touches
More than two months have gone by since I’ve last updated the Vistas progress log, and during this time, besides sitting for my exams (and passing all of them, thank God), I’ve started closing the first iteration of this project. I am pretty happy with the outcome, and more so…
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Shadow mapping effect in place
I have finally formalised shadow mapping as an effect within the Vistas framework. The first implementation supports only directional and spotlight shadows, with a point light version still in the works. Adding shadows is now as trivial as placing shadow casters and receivers under an effect node and attaching a…
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Meson : Vistas
Finally I got around posting a short video of Vistas on youtube. At this stage, there isn’t much to show bar some simple parallax-mapped primitives illuminated by a point light. As it stands, I have completed the driver abstraction layer, shader and geometry sub-systems and am currently working on the…