Category: HLSL Shaders

  • Underwater Caustics

    Underwater Caustics

    I subscribe to several guys building game engines that use youtube to showcase their work – the ‘Wicked Engine’ being one of my favourites, there are prolific updates that often show cutting edge game engine rendering. Recently a video popped up showing underwater caustic simulation and it is actually a pretty good case of ‘fakery’…

  • HBAO – Ambient Occlusion

    HBAO – Ambient Occlusion

    Last year I looked at SSAO techniques (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and a fellow game developer mentioned HBAO to me (Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion). As post processing screen based effects are often the most rewarding to work on I thought I would investigate HBAO compared to SSAO. I found that there was a significant improvement…

  • Contrast Adaptive Sharpening – AMD Post Process Technique

    Contrast Adaptive Sharpening – AMD Post Process Technique

    I’ve been experimenting with part of AMD FidelityFX suite. So far the sharpening effect is really proving worthwhile at very little performance cost: Perhaps easier to see with this juxtapose approach: It produces a subtle but very clear sharpening effect, testing continues …

  • SSAO Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

    SSAO Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

    I isolated the inherited SSAO contribution to the overall post processing effects and was a little underwhelmed Definitely some AO contribution but this type of post processing is quite expensive to compute, so thought it could get a lot better. After a trawl of what others had achieved, a refactor of the shader produced this…

  • Cogwheel Chronicles – Cel Shading

    Cogwheel Chronicles – Cel Shading

  • Cogwheel Chronicles – Dragons

    Cogwheel Chronicles – Dragons

    Dragons are peaceful creatures unless provoked. Their eggs are highly prized possessions of the rich, so the elder dragons are often disgruntled. Since making this video, the dragon fire shader has been updated as per the image above

  • New HLSL Shader Updates for Cogwheel Chronicles – Fade/Teleport/Destroy

    New HLSL Shader Updates for Cogwheel Chronicles – Fade/Teleport/Destroy

    I’m experimenting with a different shader aspect now as need a better way of introducing (and removing) special characters and items into the game (this terrain and ship entity does not appear in Cogwheel Chronicles, is just used to test shaders):

  • Parallax Occlusion Mapping

    Parallax Occlusion Mapping

    I’ve implemented POM into favourite game engine, also ‘Offset Bump Mapping’. Will have to use these techniques sparingly in Cogwheel Chronicles as Parallax Occlusion Mapping takes a lot of extra height map texture reads to calculate the final texture UVs. The results are pretty good – especially for rocky paths, caves and such like. The…

  • Volumetric Height Based Fog

    Volumetric Height Based Fog

    Fog is a very important game component for Cogwheel Chronicles – it is almost a character in the story itself. Up until now though the fog has been pretty boring, so have now implemented a swirling height based fog effect into the game. Once you’re up in the skies on your airship / biplane /…

  • Anaglyph 3D

    Anaglyph 3D

    Old school 3D using red/cyan spectacles (remember those) is making somewhat of a comeback – OK not really – VR is the new 3D I know – however I actually like the affect (probably as it brings back memories of youth) and a pair of decent stereo 3D anaglyph glasses is very cheap. Probably just make…