I finally finished writing the next article about the lightmap rendering tech that I did for The Witness. This one is about irradiance caching, and in particular I describe how to estimate irradiance gradients when the irradiance is sampled using a hemicube distribution. I’m afraid the article is a bit too specialized and I suspect [...]
If you are following The Witness blog you may have heard that we are looking for programmers, if not, go check it out. I’ve been working on The Witness for a bit more than a year. So, I thought it might be a good time to write a bit about my experience so far, in [...]
The other day I read this in Dark Shikari’s blog (one of the developers of x264): Most importantly, stop harassing the guy whose name is on the patent (Lars): he’s just a programmer, not the management or lawyers responsible for filing the patent. This is stupid and unnecessary. I’ve removed the original post because of [...]
A while ago Matt Davidson contacted me to discuss a few issues with the Gregory ACC source code that we released. Turns out there were some issues in the code that determines whether two patches have the same neighbor configuration and therefore can share the stencils. The code that compares the configurations is not very [...]
I just posted another article about the global illumination solution that I implemented for The Witness, the second one in the series: The Witness – Hemicube Rendering and Integration, September 29, 2010 The Witness – Texture Parameterization, March 30, 2010
One important feature of Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4, which I have seen very little written about, is the addition of a new precise qualifier. It’s no surprise there’s some confusion about the purpose and motivation for this new keyword. The Direct3D documentation is vague about it: precise affects all results that contribute to the [...]
You may have noticed my blog has been down during the last few months. I had some trouble with the server and lost all my posts. Unfortunately I did not have backups so it took quite some effort to restore them. At least I’ve managed to recover most articles and some of the posts that [...]
A lot has been going on in the last few months. Mariana is 14 weeks pregnant, so we are expecting to have another kid by the beginning of November. She has just finished her studies and has found herself a job at EMQ/FamiliesFirst. She works counseling problematic children and loves it so far, but she [...]
Jon has recently started a development blog about The Witness, the game that we have been working on during the last few months. So far there are a few posts about the technology and the aesthetics of the game and I’ll soon write a bit more about the global illumination implementation in some more detail. [...]
GPGPU.org takes note that OpenNL 3.0 has just been released and that this new version comes with support for CUDA. That’s certainly interesting, but for me the biggest news is that the library is now under the BSD license and thus can be used in a wider range of projects. I guess it’s time to [...]