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Windshield / Dynamic Shader Compiler
07.03.2007 11:50PM | Dan
| Requirements: |
Shader Model 3.0 Graphics Card |
| DirectX 9.0c April 2007 or newer (4.09.0000.0904 in dxdiag) |
| Windows XP (Vista and/or Windows 2000 may work; not tested) |
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| Download: | Windshield_07_03_07.zip (full source included)
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This has two major components: the pretty side (well, bear in mind that I'm not an artist and don't have 3DS Max at home, so the scenes behind the windshield aren't the greatest) and the behind-the-scenes side.
The pretty side is the windshield shader that you can see running in the demo. There are several controls you can use to choose different versions of the shader. It is similar to the water on the windows seen in the ATI toy shop demo. However, this expands upon that idea with a blurriness map that is used to make both point lights and the scene behind the windshield blurrier, depending on the water on the windshield.
However, if you've worked on shaders in retail game, particularly a PC game with all sorts of detail settings, you probably have experienced how difficult it can be to manage all those shaders. That's where my "dynamic shader compiler" comes in.
TECHNICAL JARGON ALERT
The dynamic shader compiler looks at a set of "shader settings" and compiles the appropriate versions of the shaders. It works using a hash table that associates each "material" (corresponding to a .fx shader file) with 2 functions: one that names the shader variants and one that generates the appropriate shader code. The compiler then compiles that code and stores it in another hash table, where it is associated with the variant name.
Each frame, each material looks at it shader settings to determine whether or not its current shader technique is up to date. If not, it will first check to see if the correct shader is already sitting in memory. Otherwise, it will check to see if the appropriate binary shader is on disk. If both those steps fail, it will compiler the needed variant of the shader and save the binary to disk.
In this system, each shader can respond or not respond to certain shader settings because it (potentially) has a unique set of functions associated with it. For this to work, each shader contains a macro that takes a number of parameters and defines a technique. This means that you will custom-code these functions, but that is much preferable to, say, typing all the different techniques by hand, which is tedious, boring, and prone to copy-and-paste errors. Consider that the windshield shader has 3^5 = 243 variations, and you can see what I'm talking about...
This is just a rough draft, and there are plenty of ways to expand upon it, such as replacing the hard-coded functions with scripts, and so on.
Rockin' Raytracing
06.06.2006 10:08PM | Dan
A few months back, I did some work modifying a basic raytracing framework. I added Monte Carlo sampling for the rendering of soft shadows. I also added radiosity ("light bleeding" in layman's terms) which uses Monte Carlo sampling to compute how much light is transferred between surfaces.
Screen shots:
| Radiosity
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The materials for the surfaces are just solid colors. Each rectangle has its own color. Notice how the red and green from the side walls bleed onto the scene and how the blue from the top of the box bleeds onto the upper half of the scene.
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| Monte Carlo Soft Shadows
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| 50 samples per pixel |
128 samples per pixel |
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The more samples per pixel, the longer it takes to render a scene, but the better (less grainy) the image is.
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Uberrefraction
06.06.2006 09:13PM | Dan
I re-engineered how the refraction is done in ChessGC with great results. Not only did I improve the speed several-fold, but I also managed to improve the visuals! The game now has what I call "recursive refraction," meaning that if you seen one refractive object through another, the scene is refracted twice. There's no limit to the amount of recursion.
Also note that reflection of the light on the surface of a piece blocks out the light refracted through the piece.
Here are some screen shots:
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| start of game |
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| from above |
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| close-up |
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| smash! |
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| complex shape |
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| Queen selected |
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| pawn selected |
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| 30's a crowd |
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| clusterfun |
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Refraction, baby!
05.31.2006 09:52PM | Dan
I've been working on the graphics for a chess game for the Game Development Club at UCF. I'm pretty proud at how good I've made those chess pieces look. They are refractive. You can see all the rest of the environment through them. There's no limit to how many chess pieces you can see through each other, other than the amount of color that the transparency values allow to pass through.
The board also reflects the pieces, which is pretty minor, in comparison, but a nice touch. Here are some screen shots:
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| start of game |
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| pieces visible through others |
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| no limit to transparency depth |
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| pawn selected |
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| possible moves |
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| Pawn squash! |
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| upside down |
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B-Splines
05.28.2006 04:35PM | Dan
Here is a simple little program that draws uniform cubic B-spline curves and and surfaces. It takes in the control points from a text file. You can adjust the tesselation factor and toggle drawing of the control polygon/mesh. Details are in the readme.
BSpline_DHolbert.zip
Bezier Splines!
12.10.2005 04:00PM | Dan
My final project for my Computer Graphics class involved making a program that used shaders to generate cubic Bezier curves and bicubic Bezier surfaces. The positions of the vertices were calculated in the shaders from the t or u and v coordinates. For the surfaces, per-pixel normals were calculated in the fragment shader from the derivative of the Bezier function.
I also created spline-like curves and surfaces for which each piece is a Bezier curve or surface.
You can move the control points around in real-time. It's pretty fun to see what shapes you can make. Without further ado, here is the link:
Bezier.zip
Parallax and Shadows
12.09.2005 03:24AM | Dan
Here's a little goody for you. This demo shows a parallax-mapped torus casting a shadow on a plane below. As self-occlusion is possible with shadow maps, the torus self-shadows.
Shadow Mapping
Skeletal Animation
11.18.2005 06:16PM | Dan
When I've had some free time, I've been hard at working on my skeletal animation, both developing a 3DS Max exporter and implementing skeletal animation in Dissident Logic's Warlock engine.
Here are demos for your downloading pleasure:
Bone Toggling - Shows the hierarchical nature of the skeleton by allowing you to toggle which bones are animated with the 5, 6, and 7 keys.
Teapot - Demonstrates keyframe interpolation by comparing it to non-interpolated animation. The "smooth" program interpolates and the "nointerp" program does the obvious.
Shadowy Developments
08.20.2003 09:04PM | Dan
Well, it seems that Dissident Logic always has different projects to work on. We've begun development on another project. I don't want to release any info about it just yet, so keep your eyes peeled for updates. :)
Working on TBF UI
07.15.2003 10:51AM | Dan
We're working on the User Interface for TBF. The new look will be a lot different from the original Q3 look. Stay tuned.
Downloads and Screenshots
07.07.2003 08:18PM | Dan
Beta versions of Blast - o - Rama, Trial By Fire, and Quad Chaos are all available for download.
I also added plenty of screen shots for TBF.
Forums Are Back
06.27.2003 07:46PM | Will
After a bad experience with EZBoard (ads! Ads! ADS!), we've switched the forums to a PHPBB hosted on our server. The forums aren't quite finished yet, but feel free to use them.
Quad Chaos
06.04.2003 03:55PM | Dan
The Quad Chaos beta is available...download it now! You can check it out here.
Games Page Update
06.04.2003 03:51PM | Dan
I updated the Games pages, so that you can now access info about all current Dissident Logic games.
New News System
05.17.2003 04:20AM | Dan
We have a new, web-based news system. It's nice and fancy...much better than editing the web page by hand. Ohhhh, yes.
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