A nice and cheap technique to approximate translucency was presented some time ago at GDC. The original algorithm depended on calculating the “thickness” of the model offline and baking it in a texture (or maybe vertices). Dynamically calculating thickness is often more appealing though since, as in reality, the perceived thickness of an object depends on the view point (or the light’s viewpoint) and also it is easier to capture the thickness of varying volumetric bodies such as smoke and hair. Continue reading “Dual depth buffering for translucency rendering” →

A few days ago an artist came to me scratching his head about a weird distortion he was getting on the specular highlight of his point light with an FX composer generated blinn shader. His geometry was comprised of large polygons and the effect of applying the reflection model to the surface was something like that: Continue reading “Correctly interpolating view/light vectors on large triangles” →

Recently I was using a parallax corrected cubemapping technique to add some glass reflections to a project (you can read about parallax corrected cubemapping in this excellent writeup). In general, doing planar reflections with cubemaps is not that easy, the cubemap is considered “infinite” and since it is accessed only with the reflection vector it has no notion of location (that means it does not register well with the scene, it seems detached from it and the reflections do not correspond to actual scene items/features). Continue reading “Parallax-corrected cubemapping with any cubemap” →