Back up!

After a couple of weeks of downtime, my blog and file server is back up, to my great joy and relief. :D

I have at least two subjects to blog about since I went down :

  • I made a comparison of 5 isotropic specular lighting models to find out which looked best, was most versatile, runs faster, etc. I already relased a PDF with my comparison results, but I’ll make a proper blog article too.
  • And I’ve made a static ambient occlusion sample, which pre-calculates the ambient occlusion values for each vertex of a model, saves it into the vertex colors, and made a simple shader that uses that value to filter out ambient lighting.The intuitive way for that is to use ray casting, but it’s quite slow using TV3D collision. So I’m currently making another implementation that uses GPU-accelerated hemicube rendering at each vertex to get the average luminance at this point, kind of like radiosity. My tests showed that the hemicubes implementation is 10.2 times faster while being more accurate.

I will detail my findings soon!