It’s been a while! Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working off and on (and more off than on) on a playground 3D engine called Helix. Starting as a WebGL port of a personal C++ engine I did and after rewriting it umpteen times, it ended up being a platform I do like…
Okay, I’ll state this up front: I’m probably not going to use this approach in my own engine because of many issues inherent with Variance Shadow Mapping. However, I think I did end up with some interesting results to play with, so if VSM with fixed penumbra sizes (or just for filtering) is working well…
I’ve recently decided to look into supporting subsurface scattering in my playground rendering engine Helix. It’s not the first time I’ve dabbled in the subject, but not being limited to crappy platforms I could push things a bit further. It’s a well researched and oft written about topic, so I’ve been reluctant to write up…
Introduction Image-space horizon-based ambient occlusion [HBAO] is a technique introduced by NVidia (Louis Bavoil et al.) in 2008. I recommend checking out the following resources to find out exactly how the algorithm works, this post will build on it further: ShaderX7 – Image-Space Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion (by Louis Bavoil & Miguel Sainz) The original Siggraph…
Screen-space ambient occlusion [SSAO] and its siblings like Image-Space Horizon-Based AO [HBAO] are some of those techniques that I have a hard time loving. They can be great if done right, but really horrible when done wrong. Sadly, I have the feeling the latter is still the most common case in the games I get…