Rockstar lead graphics programmer and notable visualization community figure Wolfgang Engel recently updated his Diary Of A Graphics Programmer blog, a must-read for anyone interested in visual computing, with an idea for a new rendering design.

Describing the design as a Light Pre-Pass Renderer, Engel explained: "The idea is to fill up a Z-buffer first and also store normals in a render target. This is like a G-buffer with normals and Z values. So compared to a deferred renderer, there is no diffuse color, specular color, material index, or position data stored in this stage. Next the light buffer is filled up with light properties. So the idea is to differ between light and material properties."

As the Light Pre-Pass Renderer is designed to be flexible and scalable, Engel expects programmers to produce different results based on the rendering design: "Obviously, my initial approach is only scratching the surface of the possibilities." More recently, he's revealed that he talked at the University Of California San Diego about the concept, and plans to publish more information on it in the near future.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (49)

Accompanying the launch of the Visual Computing microsite, Intel Software and Solutions Group software engineer Jeff Freeman has put together an article demonstrating several techniques (including the source code) for creating realistic terrain scenes on systems with integrated graphics solutions.

For the demonstration, Freeman mixed terrain patch generating techniques proposed by Dr. F Kenton Musgrave with texture blending and Shader Model 3.0 to create a synthetic scene on integrated graphics solutions: "Our implementation was inspired by Musgrave's work in Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach, showcasing three methods from that text: simple fBm, hybrid fBm, and the ridged multifractal algorithm, each based on Perlin's noise algorithm. The output from these methods is used to perturb the Z direction of a fixed size polygon mesh."

Freeman notes that a number of interesting fractal terrain generation problems still need to be tackled: "Applications of automatic landscape generation face decisions associated with conflicting game-play elements in the storyline or unrealistic features that present themselves from both fBm and other fractional models of terrain."

He continues: "In addition, most terrain generation methods are calculation intensive and are not real-time. While some fractal algorithms lend themselves easily to multi-threading, the result is still time consuming as is the case with the Mandelbrot set and may not apply well without significantly reducing the size of the perturbed surface greatly or reducing the number of iterations inspected."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)