Month: May 2013

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The Layered Model

For my uber-shader, I have gone with a ‘layered’ style model so that I may represent many different types of common materials easily. I’ve structured it so that some familiar, but old, concepts are represented, yet in a way that is physically plausible.

Computer-generated graphics, like most things, can be burdoned by their history. The common shading models have existed since the beginning of computer graphics, and they are usually chosen for their speed or ease of implementation. Either reason … Read the rest

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Minecraft Cabin Render

After wrapping up a large portion of the code of my ubershader, I wanted to try it out in a production-friendlier environment to look for possible improvements. I did find a few bugs and quirks, but all is better now! I think you’ll be able to see that the quality of this image is quite better than my previous renders of Minecraft scenery.

3D Minecraft Render Cabin

A few features of the shader that I’ll be going over soon are in that image:

  • The
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Image-Based Lighting

What is it?

What you see above is The Shaderball lit by an image, not by standard 3D light sources. I’m going to talk about the idea (and implementation) of using images of environments to light 3D scenes. Two other common types of lights that I’ll eventually go over are punctual lights and area lights. Image-based lights use a 360° image of an environment to cast light onto 3D objects. The image should have a high dynamic range (an … Read the rest