Roughness mip maps based on normal maps?

Welcome to a little thought experiment of mine! I haven’t really been in touch with rendering technology for the past few months, but today the sunshine brought a new idea into my head: Instead of using default super sampling to generate our roughness mip maps, why not improve the quality by using normals? This […]

Terrain Rendering In Games – Basics

A lot of early 3d games simply used large geometry meshes to display their terrain, they worked more or less like any other static object in the game. But most applications that feature extensive outdoor scenery, like for example realtime strategy or open world games, rely on heightmaps to generate and simulate their terrain.
In this article I will cover the basics of how this setup works.

Signed Distance Field Rendering Journey Pt.2

The main goal is to expand our technique to work with multiple volume textures, both from multiple instances of the same signed distance field and different meshes altogether. I will also explore sub-surface scattering and AO.

Signed Distance Field Rendering Journey pt.1

In this article I will explore ways to make Signed Distance Fields work in my engine. We can use SDFs for efficient and beautiful 3d renderings not possible otherwise. Signed Distance Fields are basically volume textures that are assigned to a mesh or height map etc.. The idea is to sample a number of locations around a mesh and calculate the shortest distance to any mesh point for each of these samples and finally store all of that in a volume texture […]

Color Grading / Correction

Color Grading is a post processing effect that changes colors based on the transformation value in a look-up table (LUT) for this specific color (or another storage medium). This enables very wide range of processing for specific values, and can be used to shift colors, change contrast, saturation, brightness and much much more.

Deferred Engine Progress Part 3

It’s been a while since I posted about the deferred engine progress, but here it is – a lot has changed and I have stuck mostly to writing about it on the thread on monogame.net. As always you can find the solution on github Renderer I uploaded this video a week ago, only some UX […]

Designing A Linear HDR Rendering Pipeline

When tackling modern HDR rendering it is worth sitting down and making a high-level overview of the pipeline first. Making sure all elements fit together and work consistently with the same math is very rewarding at the end of day. And fun, too.

Shadow Filtering For Pointlights

Dear reader, I want to write a bit about PCF filtering for omnidirectional lights (see how i just rephrased the title?) because I think this is a desirable thing to implement for a lot of beginners (like me), but I think it has not been written about as properly as I’d like. I would be […]

Shaders, Fun & Monogame

I haven’t really written in a while on this blog, but I think it’s a good time to compile some of the stuff i have been working on since the latest blog posts and I’ve decided to release a lot of smaller articles. A lot of the stuff is available for download or I’ve written […]

Fun Shaders – Part 2

Here is a short overview of some casual shaders I’ve created in the last week or so. Radial Blur A fairly simple, yet impressive effect. Not very complicated, we basically just scale the image from the blur center several times and then average out. This can look much better if we repeat the effect […]