A Graphics Guy's Note

In this post, I want to talk about a topic I have been meaning to write about for quite a few years: texture UV derivatives evaluation in my offline renderer, SORT (Simple Open Source Ray Tracer), which I’ll use throughout this post.

Recently, I had the pleasure of contributing to Nvidia’s Zorah project, the flagship demo for the RTX 50 Series GPUs.

Fiber, a less known concept compared with coroutine, is a pretty powerful addition to cooperative multitasking.

Ever since the introduction of RTX technology, the industry pushed really hard on real time GI solutions.

As a graphics programmer, I don’t usually spend too much time on something that is not strictly related to computer graphics or game engine.

Subsurface scattering has always been a challenge in computer graphics.

For more than a decade, we have been doing HDR rendering in our game engines, which means the intermediate render targets won’t be limited by the precision of the color formats.

I am working on material system in my renderer recently.

Unit test for BXDF in offline rendering turns out to be way more important than what I thought it would be.

Finally, I have some time reading books, spending several days digesting the volume rendering part of PBRT, there are loads of stuff that interest me.

Image-based lighting is a practical way to enhance the visual quality of computer graphics.

I read about this instant radiosity algorithm in the book physically based rendering 3rd these days.

I was always wondering why don’t we take the PDF of primary ray into account in a path tracer.

In my previous post, I talked some basic stuff about naive bidirectional path tracing.

I posted a blog about path tracing some time ago, I didn’t regard it as a simple algorithm until I got my hands dirty on bidirectional path tracing.

Physically based shading has been around for years, it not only eases the workflow for artist, but also delivers high quality shading with neglectable overhead, I see no reason to avoid it in today’s game.

Microfacet model can not only be used for rough metal, it can also be used to simulate rough glass material.

I’m working on microfacet brdf model for my renderer these days, noticing that it is more than necessary to provide a separate sampling method for microfacet brdf instead of using the default one, which is usually used for diffuse like surfaces and highly…

The book “Physically Based Rendering” already explains it, however I found it a little bit confusing the first time I read the chapters, which are chapters 8.2.2/8.2.3.

The book physically based rendering doesn’t spend too much effort explaining MIS, however it does mention it.

I tried path tracing two years ago in my ray tracer.

A couple of days ago, an artist asked me what exactly a directional light map is.

Direct3D12 is about to come.

One of the most important changes that DX11 has made is the brand new feature called tessellation.