Graphics

A few days ago a new version of RenderDoc was released, and while reading the changelist I discovered that Temaran has made a really cool plugin which integrate RenderDoc directly in Unreal Engine 4. This is extremely useful. More than once I launched debugging from Visual Studio, found a weird bug, and had to launch it again from RenderDoc, trying to reproduce the bug. So I looked at the source code uploaded on Github by Temaran, removed the UE4 related code and only kept a single class to be able to load RenderDoc and trigger a capture directly from my engine. ...

Physically based shading is more and more adopted and even if the core mechanism is pretty much always the same, the workflow may differ from an engine to another. For example let’s compare two common ones, often called Metallic and Specular. The metallic workflow uses a color input, the base color, and two scalar parameters, rouhghness and metallic. On a specular workflow there is two color inputs, an albedo and a specular, and a scalar, the roughness. ...

Physically based rendering is becoming the new standard for materials. It was already used a lot in AAA productions, and it’s now in Unreal Engine, Cry Engine and Unity. As a graphic programmer I’ve read a lot of papers and seen lots of presentation on that topic, but I never had the chance to try it. That’s why I made a small software, to be able to experiment both on a code and data point of view. ...

This week end I worked with the DrawIndexedInstancedIndirect function, and since I didn’t find that much informations I wanted to share my results. The next step for my voxel cone tracing project was to generate mip maps for my voxel grid. I implemented a first draft, but I needed a better way of displaying my voxel grid, to make sure that they all of them were correct. I was using the depth map to compute the world position. Then I transformed it into voxel grid coordinates to find the color of the matching voxel. ...

It’s been a while since my last post, but I’ve been busy, new job, new continent, etc… This summer I was working at Ubisoft Paris, and for one of my tasks I needed to create a sample program, to implement and an effect. It takes some time to rewrite tools you usally have in the engine like shader builder, DX entities creators, camera class, etc, but what I really found time consuming, and annoying was everything UI related. There were a lot of settings, and the goal being to explore all of the possibilities, almost all of them had to be exposed to the user. It’s such a pain, creating your sliders/buttons/whatever, setting the position, width, height, initializing, drawing and updating, etc. I used DXUT’s UI components, I’m sure there is better tools out there, but I have to admit, I don’t like UI programming, so I wanted to find a better way for my future projects. ...

&width=500&height=350 English version is coming soon ! Une première vidéo pour montrer et expliquer le fonctionnement de base de mon moteur de particules. Tous les calculs de mise à jour, physique et collisions s’exécutent sur le GPU, ce qui permet d’avoir de bonnes performances pour un grand nombre de particules (ici 1 000 000 de particules, locké à 30 fps pour les besoin de l’enregistrement). ...