Costas DevBlog

Shaders

2010-05-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

I see that few people (gash i have visitors) downloaded the shaders if anybody wants to make comments u are welcome.

Light Pre Pass Shader

2010-05-23T03:24:00.000-07:00

I created a light pre pass shader in rendermonkey.The shader uses one render target RGBA (8:8:8:8) for normals (polar coordinates xy) and depth (zw) and one render target for the light pass (no extra specular term) .The shader is availiable at the following link

http://code.google.com/p/deferred-rendering/downloads/list

Deferred Rendering

2010-04-13T01:21:00.000-07:00

I created a small project in render monkey(v 1.8) for a deferred rendering shader using hlsl shader model 3.
It supports normal mapping by saving normals using polar coordinates (not so fast :)) and depth in an R32F format.I put the code in the following link

http://code.google.com/p/deferred-rendering/

The plan is to enrich it with ssao,hdr and other effects in order to become a small pipeline.The project currently not supports light volumes but is the next step.

YediNotes

2010-02-23T10:57:00.000-08:00

My iphone app is up again to the appstore. My app has been renamed from iPostIt to Yedinotes enjoy :)

YediNotes

My iphone app is down :( but I'll become a father :)

2010-01-20T10:54:00.000-08:00

I removed my iphone app 'ipostit' from the appstore cause the name caused a copyright violation; a sad way to start the year. I' ll rename my app hoping to find a good copyright free name... tough times for small software utilities like mine. Anyone who bought the application and reads this blog, a big thanks to u. I am thinking to give it free under a different name of-course

In less than a month I'll become a father and I am more than excited; heavy word: FATHER !!!:).

I am expecting a cute girl (doctor told us about 4 kgr, God damn is big!!) therefore the women of my life get increased by one .Hope she won't be a programmer (and if she does then be a rich one for gods sake ). A hairdresser makes more money than an engineer in Greece (and especially the cute ones ;) ). Anyway, judging by the rate I post to this blog the next time I' ll be

a family guy .

p.s. Not to forget: Have a happy new year 2010!

Iphone 3d Engine

2009-12-01T12:06:00.001-08:00

I found some time to dedicate to my small 3d engine on the iphone.

The graphics engine is based on oolong engine although I do not use the VFP math library.

So far it supports md5 models and animation (doom3 format),proc scene files (portal visibility)

custom material files (for color or textures) and frustum culling .So far I have a simple first person camera able to move back- forward and strafe left -right by sliding on the screen.The engine is slow on the device because of the animation code which is a non- optimized (thinking to start learning the vfp part ;)) .

For start I will remove the weight normal calculation code which has no reason to exists for now cause I do not use any lights

iPostIt my First iPhone App is out

2009-08-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

After a loooong time my first iphone app is finally on the appstore.

The app is called iPostIt and it is a nice very user friendly post-it app with some nice practical features

check it out

Oolong engine

2009-07-07T13:11:00.000-07:00

I started playing with oolong engine http://oolongengine.com/ I had some issues in mixing my code with the engine but

everything looks ok now .There is a lot of usefull stuff and most important it is free!!!

I ported my doom 3 model code ,something is f..ing wrong with the texturing also I need

some kind of material file loader also in order to load the textures per mesh.

Horrible horrible zombies with crapy texture code

The next step is to load doom 3 level geometry (proc files bsp portal stuff) Ill move my dx code to iphone.

Iphone Key Chain Errors

2009-07-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

Finally after two evenings of trying like an idiot to move my application to the iphone I finally succeed to run my small app (a post it application soon in app store :) ) . I had huge problems with the code sign procedures and the solution was rather simple I was providing the wrong e-mail during the certificate creation.

The correct email is the one which u provided when u register as an iphone developer.

Apple has to make the procedure easier much more easier.

MD5 Animation iphone

2009-05-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

I just finish the animation code ,added some texture support using code

from this fantastic site

http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com.The next step is the calculation of normals

and the lighting support .

IPhone Development

2009-05-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

One month ago I decided to join the hordes of the iphone dev cult ,listening to the warcry

"Get rich or die spamming" so i bought a mac mini with 2 gigs of ram and a crappy intel graphics card.

I am in the final stages of finishing my first app (a small utility)

which is going to be published as soon as my enrollment will take place.In the mean time I ported some bits of the md5 doom 3 model loader into iphone and it loads only the basic mesh geometry no animations or texturing .I havent tried it to a real iphone cause I am not registered yet and I do not have one (and its quite expensive).So these are the first results from the iphone simulator.

Happy new year

2009-01-03T01:26:00.000-08:00

Happy new year to everyone.Lets hope the economy will be stabilized and that people WILL not loose their jobs ,everybody saw that happening in their work and some where unlucky enough

to be unemployed just before Christmass.Lets hope that the 'brains' in command will figure out a solution although I doubt about that.

Now for the bright side.

This is the first thread for the new year and i feel kinda happy since

I did a lot of work on my doom3 level loader.Frustrum culling plus bsp -portal rendering included

thanks for the info I found on the following site

http://developer.infi.nl/index.php?ID=5

the guy did a great job and has very good comments explaining the bsp stuff .Ive included depth 0f field and two models inside just to spice the things up.

Still the engine is verrry slow but ill fix the goddamn thing.The level is borrowed from the site mentioned before.

I try to load a proper doom3 level (ex alphalabs1 ) but i have some problems with the material files but ill figure it out.

The plan now is to include ssao for the level geometry and PCF shadowing .

Happy new year again

PS .I borrow a lot of assets from sites but I also mention where I am getting the stuff from if anybody is readin the threads and has any problem I ll remove the thread.

Depth of Field

2008-11-23T07:58:00.000-08:00

I implemented the depth of field shader described in ATI 'Advanced Depth of field' paper which produces very nice results.

In this screenshot head and gun are blurred as they are closer to the camera.I would have much better results if I have a background to that well maybe next time.

SSAO 2

2008-11-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

fixed some bugs from the previus shader and this is the last result .

If anybody is interested I can post the render monkey project.The above screenshot is from my dx10 engine.I have to admit I did a lot of stupid mistakes but what the hell this time i think and I hope also that the result is good (i think i said that before)

SSAO Revisited

2008-11-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

This is the follow up to the ssaoimage I posted in gamedev. I spend a lot of time for producing

a good result especially with depth values so instead I ve use normals.I think that there can be more than one implemantation and I know that this is not physically 100% correct but its nice.

MD5 Model in DX10

2008-10-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

I port my md5 loader code into my dx10 engine.I optimise it a little bit and I made a few modifications for example I calculate normal weights instead of recalculating all normals after creating an animated pose.Still I have to do the same thing for the tangents and as far as I know it has to be done the same way as the normals.This means I have to calculate the tangents from the bindpose vertices ,rotate them using the joint quaternion and then create the tangents weights and finally get their weight sums during the animation.

technocrati

2008-08-09T00:06:00.000-07:00

Technorati Profile

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

2008-08-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

I found a couple of articles about ssao and i decided to create a render monkey project to implement the algorithm.Actually this is a mix of two shaders which can be found in the following articles
http://www.codeplex.com/XNACommunity/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Screen-Space%20Ambient%20Occlusion%2c%20c%u00f3mo%20implementarlo&referringTitle=SSAO

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=488598

Image without ssao

Image with ssao

DOOM3 Level Geometry

2008-04-21T01:20:00.000-07:00

Screenshot of a doom level in wireframe (alpha labs 1).I use the data from the proc file no bsp

info at this moment.

DX10

2008-04-21T00:50:00.001-07:00

I decided to write a new engine based on the DX10 render pipeline .I implement a small framework capable of handling vertex and index buffers,textures,lights,camera and shaders through a series of wrapper classes.Instead of starting as a small tech demo I had an api in my

mind which is going to be enriched in the way.This is the first screenshot of a shader for Phong shading.There are a lot of thing to be done

first is the porting of md5 loader code from dx9 to dx10 plus the other stuff from my previus engine.Last I begun to implement a doom3 proc file loader which is a mess at this point but it loads the geometry of the level and textures (need to parse the mat files).

Fake Hdr

2008-01-20T08:28:00.000-08:00

I decided to create a series of post effects in my engine,as usual my reference were the shaders from rendermonkey .The first post effect is based on the fake Hdr shader provided by ATI.I stuck in the set get render targets for a while (I used them before for the shadow map but this time the stuff was a liitle bit more complicated) at the end I was rewarded for my persistance :).The sky box shader is taken from the Frank Luna's book Directx 9c Programming a shader approach.I forgot to mention that I enchanced the bump map shader to receive the enviromental values from the enviroment map with interesting results!!Last I play with the exposure value and I created a simple day/night cycle effect .I believe that with a slight modification I can include some tone mapping but I have to figure out how to handle proper hdr images.

First Steps Towards a 3D Engine

2008-01-14T00:34:00.000-08:00

This is the first post for the new year so best wishes to anyone reading this blog!!
My little tech demo has turned into a dll ,I made changes and fix some nasty bugs ,although I have a small problem with reseting the device .The plan to change the code and reorganize it in order to look like an API ,after that my priority is to construct a post effect framework in order to include
depth of field and motion blur effects.Last I gave my engine a name .. YediOne .

Parallax Occlusion Mapping

2007-11-29T13:19:00.000-08:00

Simple opm is added ,the shader comes from the render monkey library.The results are nice but i think it can get even better by using the shader from the directx sdk sample which takes account the visualization of level of detail colours of the texture.A skybox is also added (u can see it behind ;) ) .

FREAK SHOW

2007-11-17T06:40:00.000-08:00

In this screen shot Cyberdemon wears his original clothes,also I added pinky and a zombie in the show .The number of triangles shown is wrong , I haven't included something ;). The fps stays at 30 ,more optimization is needed but I am at the beginning

Optimization

2007-11-15T23:49:00.000-08:00

I did some optimization stuff back on the end of September which involved working a little bit with vertex buffers ,rearranging my code and rethinking about how to calculate efficiently the animation of the model. I made a huge mistake by recalculating the index buffer for each frame and after fixing that I had 100% increase into my frame rate.The next step is to calculate the normals by using the influence bone positions just like the vertices and not to recalculate on each frame.Since I am using bump maps for lighting there is the need to optimize the tangents also but I haven't figure out how this will be done.Last I add into my engine a small resource manager for my textures based on stl maps in order to keep tracking what is load in order not to reload it again.Thinks are involving despite the October break, lot of work and Java seminars.

Some references

2007-09-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

Some things about the demo,the source code for the md5 model is based on this site
tfc.duke.free.fr
which provides an opengl implementation.The bump mapping technique is
taken from the ati hlsl shader which can be found in the RenderMoney demos,
as for the shadow mapping I used the shader provided from the book
"Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach" by Frank Luna,
where i made some small changes. There are some optimization issues but iam still in the beginning.
I know that the textures seem weird the explanation is easy for the cyberdemon i used the skin from the zombie model ;) still it seems cool.

First things first

2007-09-09T02:01:00.000-07:00

Greedings and welcome to my blog.The purpose of this blog is involving around computer programming in general .Few months ago i started writting a small game engine using directx 9c and c++ as an excercise in 3d graphics.This is the first screenshot.So far my little engine supports
doom 3 md5 animation, real time lighting using normal mapping and real time shadows using shadow maps .