CodeItNow

Well, you could point out a number of things to answer that question. There’s some pretty obvious aliasing, a random pixel on the ground which should be in shadow but isn’t, it’s noisy, boring etc. But that’s not my point. The point is: It’s too dark!

I know it’s too dark because I know how I rendered it, and I rendered it wrong. It still kind of looks acceptable (well to me at least) though. I’m not sure that I would say that it’s implausibly dark if I didn’t know it.

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I’ve been putting it off for a while, but with my recent trip to GDC and the arrival of the Direct3D 11 beta, I thought it was about time I switched my renderer to be multithreaded. One of the things I learned at a Direct3D 11 talk at GDC is that it works on ‘down-level hardware’, which means DirectX 9 & 10 cards. Of course, you don’t get the snazzy new hardware features, but you do get some of the benefits of the new API, like multithreading and limited compute shaders (albeit not as fast as it will be on the real hardware).
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Recently at work I was chatting with a colleague, and the topic of energy conservation for specular reflections came up. This reminded me that I’ve been sitting on a blog post for a while about just this subject, so I thought it was time to finish it.

First of all, I’d like to start by looking at the standard diffuse reflection model. In games, the typical formula for calculating diffuse reflection from a particular light is:

Where Cd is the diffuse material color, Li is the light color, N is the normal, and L is the normalized direction to the light. What’s the problem with this? Well, it’s not energy conserving. In itself, this isn’t really a problem since we don’t calculate multiple bounces of light in games, so we’re not adding energy to the scene as light bounces around like would happen in a ray tracer. It’s a good starting point for discussion though.
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In my previous post, I wrote very briefly about an  important improvement to the irradiance caching algorithm – irradiance gradients – and I’m going to expand on rotational gradients this time.

Gradients

The gradient of a function represents both the direction and rate of change of that function as the inputs vary. For a one dimensional function this is simply the derivative of the function. As you move into higher dimensions, you need to consider which coordinate system the inputs for the function are specified in, as this will change how you need to calculate the gradient.

For now, I’m just going to focus on calculating the gradient of a function defined using normalized spherical coordinates. Unfortunately, there’s no real standard way to define spherical coordinates, and despite similar looking symbols, the values are often interchanged. I’m going to define the spherical coordinates on the unit sphere as azimuthal value φ [0, π), and polar value θ [0, 2π).

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Solving the rendering equation with even just one bounce of indirect lighting can take a long time. The majority of time spent rendering a frame is in estimating the lighting integral. For example, rendering a single bounce of indirect lighting at 720p resolution with 256 sample rays for a Monte Carlo estimator requires about 237 million rays to be cast. This doesn’t even include the rays needed for sampling the lights for direct lighting, so in practice, the total will be even higher.

One interesting observation made by Greg Ward in his Siggraph ’88 paper is that contrary to direct lighting, where shadows and lights can cause harsh changes, the indirect lighting on a surface tends to vary relatively slowly. One way to picture why this is, is to imagine the computing average color from the what you can see from each of your eyes. Even though each eye has a slightly different view on the world, the images they see are nearly similar, and so the average color is also nearly the same.

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A couple of days ago, I compared the images my ambient occlusion integrator produced with those of Modo using similar settings. I noticed immediately how much ‘cleaner’ the render from Modo was. Clearly there was an issue with the way I was picking my samples, so I set about improving things.

My approach for generating the ambient occlusion rays was to generate uniform random samples over the hemisphere about the normal. Based on two random numbers in the range [0,1), I calculate the normalized sample direction using the following function:

Vector3 Sample::UniformSampleHemisphere(float u1, float u2)
{
	const float r = Sqrt(1.0f - u1 * u1);
	const float phi = 2 * kPi * u2;

	return Vector3(Cos(phi) * r, Sin(phi) * r, u1);
}

This generates points on a hemisphere from uniform variables u1 and u2, where each point has equal probability of being selected. The following image was generated with 256 random uniform samples:

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For the first time in about three years, I’ve had two weeks off work. I’ve spent a lot of time just relaxing and taking a break from things, but I’ve also been able to get back to doing some graphics work. Ever since Vivendi bought Activision, the project that I was leading has been “put on hold”, so I’ve been back on the game team. It’s not as fun for me, that’s for sure, but luckily, I have my code at home to play with, so all is not lost! With the holidays, I’ve found some motivation to get back to it.

What have I been doing? Well, as I was approaching the break, I read through the course notes from the Practical Global Illumination with Irradiance Caching course at Siggraph last year. I thought the course itself was really good, and very clearly presented. After blitzing through the notes again, I thought I’d have a go at writing a ray tracer. It seemed simple enough at the time, but like most things, the devil is in the details.

The first thing I did was to set up a really simple single-threaded ray tracer that just displayed the color of the surface it hit. This was fairly quick to get up and running once I had written a few supporting classes for the cameras and shapes. It’s not very glamorous, but it’s a start:

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Back in 2002, I started my first job in the games industry at Climax Studios in England. I have to admit, I didn’t know very much about game development at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’d been writing little 2D games, and messing around with rubbish particle systems at home, but it was nothing like what I was about to get involved with. Despite my inexperience, somehow I did enough to pass the interview, and I was offered a job as a junior programmer.

As seemed to be typical for the time, my introduction to the industry was pretty much a trial by fire. I quickly found out that I couldn’t hope to truly understand every single new thing I encountered, so I learned to just accept some things as the truth. For example, I was told that the dot product of two normalized vectors yields the cosine of the angle between them. I just accepted this, and only took the time to find out why later on.

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Well, there’s not much to report really. I’ve been spreading myself very thin recently, investigating a few different things, so I thought might be nice to post a status update.

Variance Shadow Maps

Yes, I’m jumping on the variance shadow maps boat. They look nice, they’re easy to implement, and have relatively small overhead over traditional shadow maps. I read the article in GPU Gems 3, which is also available here, and it was pretty easy to implement from there. It probably took me about 2 hours to go from no shadows at all to variance shadow maps. After a bit of tomfoolery to get rid of the light-leaking I ended up with the image below. I haven’t implemented any bias yet, so there are some errors there, but the VSMs appear to be working very nicely.

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A while back, I wanted to improve the material system I was using in my engine at home, since at the time, I had just just one fixed material type. I had to specify three textures for each object I wanted to render: Diffuse, Specular and Normal. If I didn’t want specular, I had to use a black specular texture. This was barely OK for very simple things, but soon I wanted more…

I’m not really going to mention anything about the lighting in this article, since that’s still a work in progress (as can be seen by the lack of shadows below), but I hope this will be interesting nonetheless.

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