If you have ever tried to ray trace voxels before, you might have heard about Sparse Voxel Octrees. They are one of those ideas that are just simple and clever enough to be intriguing, but not so great to hold in practice at the basic premise.
Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorial KHR
A comprehensive tutorial for learning Vulkan ray tracing with practical examples.
Sparse Virtual Shadow Maps
Devlogs and tutorials about GPGPU and graphics programming
heerich.js
Tiny engine for 3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG — boolean ops, oblique/perspective cameras, zero dependencies.
"Psycho-material geographies" of 3D spaces, and The Beginner's Guide by Davey Wreden et al
https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/10/the-beginners-guide-by-davey-wreden-et.html
Evaluating and Sampling Glinty NDFs in Constant Time
Geometric features between the micro and macro scales produce an expressive family of visual effects grouped under the term 'glints'. Efficiently rendering these effects amounts to finding the highlights caused by the geometry under each pixel. To allow for fast rendering, we represent our faceted geometry as a 4D point process on an implicit multiscale grid, designed to efficiently find the facets most likely to cause a highlight. The facets' normals are generated to match a given micro-facet normal distribution such as Trowbridge-Reitz (GGX) or Beckmann, to which our model converges under increasing surface area. Our method is simple to implement, memory-and-precomputation-free, allows for importance sampling and covers a wide range of different appearances such as anisotropic as well as individually colored particles. We provide a base implementation as a standalone fragment shader.
VoxPort Studio Documentation
Complete guide to recording, publishing, RSS, analytics, and everything VoxPort Studio has to offer.
Room-based maps
There are a couple of different ways to go about creating room-based maps. We'll look at doing this by generating random rectangles, by using random BSP trees and Waveform Function Collapse (WFC).
Rendering Particles with Compute Shaders
Overview I developed a technique to render single-pixel particles (using additive blending) with compute shaders rather than the usual fixed-function rasterization with vertex and fragment shaders. My approach runs 31–350% faster than rasterization on the cases I tested and is particularly faster for some “pathological” cases (which for my application are not actually that uncommon). I observed these speedups on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. Using this technique allowed me to ship an app that runs on minimum-spec hardware without sacrificing visual fidelity.
Infinite Grid Shader
Learning to create an infinite grid procedurally using GLSL shaders. This post contains my notes, lessons and findings, and is intended for personal reference. Therefore, you might find errors, misjudgments, and other issues, which are fine by me because my intention was to learn by teaching myself. In a way, I was being my own rubber duck.
Mesh Outlines Without Post-Processing in Unreal Engine
Some time ago I saw a neat solution by Cory Spooner on outlining meshes using particle sprites. The concept has been done before – but it’s interesting enough to cover it regardless for Unreal Engine...
Fast calculation of the distance to cubic Bezier curves on the GPU
Bézier curves are a core building block of text and 2D shapes rendering. There are several approaches to rendering them, but one especially challenging problem, both mathematically and technically, is computing the distance to a Bézier curve. For quadratic curves (one control point), this is fairly accessible, but for cubic (two control points) we're going to see why it is so hard.
Discontinuity-Aware 2D Neural Fields
Neural image representations offer the possibility of high fidelity, compact storage, and resolution-independent accuracy, providing an attractive alternative to traditional pixel- and grid-based representations. However, coordinate neural networks fail to capture discontinuities present in the image and tend to blur across them; we aim to address this challenge. In many cases, such as rendered images, vector graphics, diffusion curves, or solutions to partial differential equations, the locations of the discontinuities are known. We take those locations as input, represented as linear, quadratic, or cubic \bez curves, and construct a feature field that is discontinuous across these locations and smooth everywhere else. Finally, we use a shallow multi-layer perceptron to decode the features into the signal value. To construct the feature field, we develop a new data structure based on a curved triangular mesh, with features stored on the vertices and on a subset of the edges that are marked as discontinuous. We show that our method can be used to compress a 100,000^2-pixel rendered image into a 25MB file; can be used as a new diffusion-curve solver by combining with Monte-Carlo-based methods or directly supervised by the diffusion-curve energy; or can be used for compressing 2D physics simulation data.