CodeItNow

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »