http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise code and randomness Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:15:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I actually haven't done too much rendering work in the last six to eight months.  I've been doing a lot of game prototyping.  Two prototypes have been put to the side for now and I'm working on a third with a couple of folks.  I'm just going to dump out ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=34 Just a quick link post today.  Here's a video of the lighting system I've worked on with Pat Wilson and Tom Spilman. I'm mostly responsible for the dark pixels in the video. ;) Also, I got a new personal best score at Robotron today: 624k.  I'm slowly inching up to a ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=33 This is a quick slideshow of screenshots and notes about various shadow map techniques.  I hope to continue adding to this in the future. The notes are pretty terse and probably not useful unless you read the source papers. ;) http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=32 I've gotten a late start on this rendering thing.  One of the pieces I've been struggling with is math.  I've improved quite a bit over the past year and I'm actively educating myself to catch up.  Recently, a friend of mine asked me for some help with a matrix problem.  ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=31 Let's say you've got a render state problem.  If object A is on the screen at the same time object B is on the screen, object A gets screwed up.  Here's a quick way of using PIX to track it down: Take a snapshot of the frame that works and a ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=30 I've only been doing graphics stuff seriously for about a year.  One of the first things I tackled was shadow mapping.  I got a simple shadow map implementation going and then implemented Variance Shadow Maps.  It's based on statistics and the big deal is that you can filter your shadow ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=28 Mesh decimation is the process of simplifying a mesh. Most of the time you do this to improve performance. A popular method of mesh decimation is called the edge collapse. You move a vertex from one side of an edge in a mesh to the other. ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=27 While working on Parallel Split Shadow Maps something that had been tripping me up was calculating the bounding box of a frustum in a light's clipspace. I need this bounding box in order to scale the projection matrix to look at the piece of the scene that I'm interested ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=26 Here's an article I've been meaning to write for a little while. It's about PIX, the DirectX utility that ships with the DirectX SDK. It's a great utility for tracking down rendering issues. The point of this article isn't really to explain it in great detail, because ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=25 Here's another older article that I reckon I should just get out of the queue. As a pretty hardcore Visual Studio user, my initial experience with XCode was awful. After using it for a while, XCode isn't so bad. I still prefer VS as it's more mature, but here ... http://www.bzztbomb.com/noise/?p=4