ClemensKernBlog

VrgStudio W.I.P. and Master Thesis

Clemens — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:39:58 +0000

It’s been a long time since my last post. Well, I finished my studies about three months ago and can call myself a “Master of Science” now. Then, I started working full-time at Trinigy as a Software Engine Engineer. So I don’t have much time to work on the Vergence Engine but I won’t let it die. Here is a short overview of the new Toolset I am working on as my Master Thesis (which can be downloaded >here< or watch my presentation >here<. Both are in german, sorry about that) which is called VrgStudio:

The Editor is based on a Multiprocess Plugin Architecture resulting in a high flexibility and stability. The following picture shows the basic architecture:

The Graphical User Interface, built on top of Qt, is defined in XML-Files and a Scripting Language. Currently I am only using JavaScript powered by Google’s V8. This allows me to edit the GUI and some of the functionalities (the scripted ones) during runtime of the editor.

The pics below show the basic Level Editor and a Curve Editor which enables easy animation over daytime, for example the color of the sun as shown in the shot.

I also implemented a small Resource Browser which is still lacking thumbnails for resources other than textures. This browser is largely implemented in JavaScript and provides a realtime filter by keywords.

This was only a very short overview of what the editor can do. Feel free to ask any questions if you are interested in any details.

Summer Games University

Clemens — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:35:42 +0000

Today I gave a presentation at the first Summer University at the HdM. The last two days, Andreas Stiegler talked a lot about engine architecture, gameobjects and making everything ready for multiplayer games. I talked about how to connect a render pipeline to the engine and also about deferred rendering and lightprepass renderer. You can watch the slides here:

Or download as pdf. You can also watch my talk here.

Resource Handling

Clemens — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:09:42 +0000

Last week, I started working a bit on the Resource Handling of my engine. So first of all, I fixed the asynchronous loading mechanism (there was a lot of evil threading stuff in it). Hopefully it runs smooth now. After that I implemented a feature that I call “hot-swap resources”, which means I can switch any resource at run time. For Example, I edit a texture, save it and go back to the engine and the texture gets reloaded automatically, no need to close and restart the engine. This also works with any shader, material or mesh file. Reloading is also asynchronous so you won’t notice any lags. Pretty cool stuff I think

Shadows

Clemens — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:17:43 +0000

First of all, happy new year to everyone.

During the last weeks I started implementing shadows for the sun light. This is the result:

Currently I use a regular 2k shadowmap with a 12 tap random disc PCF. You can see some noise artifact at the shadow borders. I tried a blur pass on it, but the result looked even more ugly.

Disco Lights

Clemens — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:40:00 +0000

Here it is, the first shots with multiple lights in nice colors… Christmas time! Also note the slight depth blur in the second shot…

still no shadows

Asset redo

Clemens — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:31:26 +0000

Originally, my plan for this week was redoing the scene graph of the Vergence Engine. But meehhh, programming all the time isn’t that fun. So I did some modeling this week. More precisely redos of older models (the old tire was made by Kai). Here are a two comparison renderings:

And finally the 3ds max 64bit exporter is working and has a unit converter now

Vergence SSAO improvements

Clemens — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:26:53 +0000

I am currently improving the visual quality and performance of the deferred rendering system for the Vergence Game Engine. Here are some shots showing the screen space ambient occlusion we use. A really good trick is to use a very small random texture (4×4 in my case) so you can blur out the noise easily. I use four blur passes with a simple depth weighted cross filter, which runs super fast. Varying the blur kernel size over the passes gave me a stable result without any visible noise artifact.

Next step will be view frustum culling (oh yes we don’t have the simple things ) and then hopefully get the multithreaded rendering system working. While profiling I recognized our HDR-Bloom is pretty expensive too. I will work on that later.

Gamesday 09

Clemens — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:31:34 +0000

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the gamesday at my university. The talk was about realtime lighting, especially about deferred and light prepass rendering. You can watch the slides here:

Or download as pdf

As soon as the videostream is ready, I will post the link here.

Map Updates

Clemens — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:42:25 +0000

a few new pics, still W.I.P.

Good (old) raw metal

Clemens — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:53:40 +0000

The successor of my frame at an extremely good price. I just couldn’t resist and I don’t regret it. Awesome stuff!