Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 161 — December 13, 2020


Cameras and Lenses

  • the article gives an understanding of how different types of camera and lenses work
  • provides many interactive examples that explain the various elements, aspects and how they interact

[video] Glyphs, shapes, fonts, signed distance fields.

  • the video tutorial provides an overview of signed distance fields
  • explains how to use SDFs for font rendering
  • provides an example implementation of multiple font effects (thickness, feather, outline color)

[video] Moving Mobile Graphics - SIGGRAPH 2020 Course

  • video recording from all talks in the Siggraph 2020 course in a single video
  • covering Intro to Moving Mobile Graphics, Mobile Graphics 101, Vulkan on Mobile Done Right, Deferred Shading in Unity URP,
  • Large Voxel Landscapes on Mobile, High Quality, High-Performance Graphics in Filament are covered below in more detail

Physically Based Rendering - Phong BRDF

  • introductory slides for physically based rendering course
  • provides an overview of fundamental terms and concepts
  • explaining how the different ideas fit together to create a basic physically based shading implementation

[video] Grass Fields in Unity URP! Procedurally Generate Blades with Compute Shaders | Game Dev Tutorial

  • the video tutorial shows how to generate grass blades that swing in the wind
  • LODs are supported, reducing the number of segments for each blade of grass when it’s further away from the camera
  • implemented as compute shaders using Unity

Shockwave Shader Graph

  • the video tutorial explains how to implement a ripple effect
  • first implements a sprite-based effect, extends this afterward to support 3D mesh deformation
  • implemented using Unity shader graph

Debugging refraction in a ray tracer

  • short blog post that provides advice on how to debug refraction in a raytracer
  • provides what values to expect when debugging refraction on a glass sphere

Texture Compression in 2020

  • the article presents an overview of different compression formats and libraries
  • comparing quality and compression speed for several texture types

Generating Ray-Traced Caustic Effects in Unreal Engine 4, Part 1

  • the article explains the implementation of Caustics using a photon mapping technique that takes advantage of DXR capabilities
  • the first part focuses on caustics from meshes (such as bottles, glasses)
  • additional provides a performance comparison between Nvidia GPUs
  • part 2 focuses on water-based caustics


Using Mesh Shaders for Professional Graphics

  • the article shows examples of how to use mesh shaders (code examples in GLSL)
  • show how different data types and models influence the performance
  • gives advice on best-practices when designing a solution for Nvidia hardware
  • additionally provides pointers on what might be different on other hardware


AMD RDNA™ 2 Instruction Set Architecture

  • the RDNA 2 Instruction Set has been released
  • shows that RDNA 2 supports dedicated instructions for BVH intersection to accelerate ray tracing workloads


Radeon™ Memory Visualizer is now Open Source

  • AMD released the source code for the Memory Visualizer
  • tools support Vulkan and D3D12 to provide insights into memory usage

Softening polygon intersections in Blightbound

  • the article shows how fading our transparent objects when getting close to an intersection helps them to appear more volumetric
  • technique presented in the article uses the depth buffer information from opaque objects to fade out the transparent


Accelerating Unstructured Mesh Point Location with RT Cores

  • the paper presents the results of research into using the RTX raytracing hardware for unstructured point rendering
  • presents multiple iterations from a reference CUDA implementation to more complex RTX solutions
  • comparing performance for the different approaches


[video] SIGGRAPH 2020 — High Quality, High Performance Rendering in Filament

  • video for the talk has been released, was covered in the week 147
  • how to take advantage of tiling GPU architecture and enable the use of fp16 math
  • cloth shading, reduction of energy loss for rough metals, multi-bounce AO


[video] SIGGRAPH 2020 - Large Voxel Landscapes On Mobile

  • the talk explains the Voxel-based terrain system used in Roblox
  • voxels store material id and material occupancy (0,1) range
  • how to generate meshes from the sparse voxel representation
  • texture mapping, tiling reduction, water considerations, and various performance advice

Thanks to Robert Wallis for support of this series.


Would you like to see your name here too? Become a Patreon of this series.