Tag Archives: Deferred Shading

Close to deferring the deferred demo post…

Yeah, I was quite close to postpone the writing of this post to tomorrow, but I won’t. 🙂
The title is humorous but clear, my last demo deals again with deferred shading.

GLSL_deferred with SSAO, iterative parallax mapping and Depth of Field

This time I made every effort to do things right: there is support for directional, point and spot lights and, much more important for performances, lights are rendered only inside their influence volumes using projective texturing.
This means that while directional ones affect everything and have to be rendered as full screen quads, point lights are only rendered as cubes and spot lights as pyramids.

Comparison between disabled and enabled SSAO

This is slightly different from the usual approach taken, which uses spheres and cones but is also a bit more vertex heavy. 🙂
Rendering bounding shapes should barely affect performance, but makes the check for camera position a bit different.
The check is disabled by default as it is sufficient to cull front faces and invert the depth test to avoid double lighting issue and benefit from some depth optimization.
By enabling the check the application will expose my poor approximation of checking if the camera is inside a pyramid by using a formula meant for a cone, so better if it stays disabled, while the volume is not intersecting the far plane everything should behave as expected… 😀

Comparison between normal mapping and iterative parallax mapping

The demo is also a bigger attempt into effects integrations, it will serve as a test bed for a more organized and high level framework.
As a matter of fact it also features Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Iterative Parallax Mapping and Depth of Field.
Very cool stuff, but I already have a list of things that I would like to implement sooner or later, like a Light Pre-Pass, a couple of advanced shadow mapping techniques, the integration of water rendering, HDR illumination and the reconstruction of position from depth.

Normal rendering and Depth of Field blur

I have published the sources and a video (Vimeo | YouTube), that for the first time comes with a nice soundtrack: it’s Nova Siberia by Big Giant Circles (Jimmy Hinson) from OverClocked ReMix! 😉

Note: I have had a hard time with glc, x264, mencoder and ffmpeg but still YouTube doesn’t accept my video together with the sound, at the moment I have uploaded a mute version.

Let there be light!

I started exploring deferred shading rendering to display multiple light sources and ended writing a demo featuring eight different lighting techniques and a PyOpenGL class library. 🙂

glsl_multilight

The whole story is more than a month old, just after releasing the first depth of field demo I began studying deferred shading, but I extended my purpose to include other lighting methods, like single and multi-pass fixed-pipeline lighting, per-vertex and per-pixel single and multi-pass shader lighting and, of course, deferred one.

While writing the C code, I thought it was going to be fun to also port it to Python, this way I could have also have a look to the “new” (ArchLinux adopted it quite late 🙂 ) ctypes PyOpenGL, aka PyOpenGL 3.

Unfortunately, many little but annoying issues delayed me until today:

  • not setting explicitely glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL) (or, alternatively, not clearing the depth buffer at each pass) for multi-pass scene rendering made every pass to be discarded excepting the first one.
  • trying to make a buggy Python glDrawBuffers() wrapper work.
    Actually I had no luck with this and give up on MRTs support in PyOpenGL.
  • trying to figure out why VBOs didn’t work on PyOpenGL, I give up on this too. 🙂
  • using a uniform variable to index the gl_LightSource structure array, which prevented the shader from running on Shader Model 3.0 cards
  • exploring all the possibilities that could ever lead to “the brick room is very dark in fixed-pipeline mode” issue, only to discover today that this was a mere scaled normals problem.
    It was easily solved enabling GL_RESCALE_NORMAL

At last I made it, I have made a multi light demo that includes deferred lighting (although very rough and not optimized at all) and shows coherent lighting in all rendering modes.
The PyOpenGL class library almost works, no MRTs and VBOs, but it is functional enough to sport a complete DoF2 and multilight (without deferred mode, which relies on MRTs, of course) demo conversions.

It’s not a news anymore that you can view it in action on my YouTube Channel, or in a high definition 720p version hosted on my Vimeo page.

All’s well that ends well. 🙂