Tough decision made

Hi after another long break,

I gave quite a lot of thought to it and I finally decided to stop developing nGENE, at least for the time being. The reason for this is that I don't have as much time as in the past and I also lack motivation to do so.  I'm pretty busy with work (we released Photomatix Pro 4.2 beta by the way). Maybe in the future I will go back to graphics programming but it's hard to predict.

Also if you want to stay in touch with me, I have another blog on which I post regularly. It's about photography but as some of you take photos you might find it interesting. You know, it's a lot easier and less time-consuming to upload one photo a day and write several sentences than to write whole page entry once a week.

So thank you for your support and feedback you provided in the last few years, I really enjoyed this time.

Cheers,
Wojciech

Masters and HDR tutorial

Hi again,

sorry for being silent for such a long time (again...) but I was busy with finalizing my studies. In last few days I finished them with A+ grade with my thesis being about 3D engine programming ("Design and implementation of a 3D framework for games and visualizations" to be more precise). If no one at my university will have anything against it, I will share it of course (probably first translating it to English as it was written in Polish). Nothing special in it, just what almost everyone knows but maybe it will turn out to be useful for beginners.

I've also just finished writing my HDR tutorial, which you can find here. I hope anyone interested in photography will find it useful as it should help you get the look of photos similar to the one on the left.

I should be back to nGENE programming in a week or two.

God rays - short video

In the last two posts I focused on the God rays effect (see this and this). This one will be the last related to this technique (currently I'm working on occlusion culling and vegetation so I will share my thoughts on these topics after finishing).
In this short video you can see not only god rays but also improved clouds (again...) and some more serious movement of the water:

God rays - some more examples

In the previous post I described implementation of screen-space God rays. Here's the time to show some more screenshots:

Screen-space God rays

God rays (aka light shafts, light beams, light rays) are beautiful phenomenon caused by the light going through some medium denser than air (like dust or smoke). Before going into details here's my photo showing them in real life:

There are several approaches to render them. One of them, based on slicing volume with planes, I described some time ago here.

This time inspired by my discussion with Lukasz Zmijewski, I decided to implement God rays as a screen-space effect.

Variance Shadow Mapping - theory and implementation

In my previous post I presented video from my implementation of VSM - Variance Shadow Mapping. Today I will share theory and code behind it. You can find original paper and sources by Donnelly and Lauritzen here.
The technique is very simple yet it produces very nice and quite natural shadows. It can be considered a modification to standard shadow mapping.

Variance Shadow Mapping

Variance Shadow Mapping (VSM for short) is a very nice method of creating soft shadows. It's much faster than PCF as it use separable filter to achieve "blurring". Also it has potential of reducing artifacts. I will detail on this in the next post, today I would just like to share a short video showing my implementation:

Vignetting

Vignetting is a pretty strange effect - it is about image being darker in the corners than it is in the middle. In photography it is considered undesirable feature of the lens (or simply defect ;) ) as it significantly reduces image quality. Cheaper lenses have higher vignetting, whilst more expensive ones have very limited one (or almost none). However, in the last few years black & white and vintage like post processing became very popular amongst photographers. As strong vignette is also considered vintage (because almost no of the current lenses have it at such extremes) it is present in many modern photos (quite a paradox, don't you think). So I decided to implement it for nGENE. Actually "implement" is a bit too big word here as it is done using following few lines of shader code:

float vignetteStrength = 0.3f;
float4 scene = tex2D(sceneTex, IN.texCoord);
float4 colour = lerp(scene, vignetteColor, vignetteStrength * length(0.5f - IN.texCoord));

It couldn't be simpler I guess :) Although it isn't perfect it works very nice and it works in the very same way I apply it to my photos.

BTW I uploaded new screenshot from nGENE to Warsztat.gd:

I'm back - sort of

Long time no see. I haven't posted anything here for a few last months as I was very busy with a lot of stuff (work, moving to another flat and my thesis amongst other). However, for about a week now I'm developing nGENE again.Nothing really serious, some minor improvements, fixes of some graphical glitches and implementation of new tone mapping operators for the HDR pipeline. But after such a long break it's a real fun. I would love to finally play with DirectX 11 but I'm not sure if I will have time to implement new renderer from scratch.
Moreover, I've recently came up with an idea for a simple game (at least in terms of graphics). I hope to start working on it very soon (actually it was what motivated me to introduce mentioned changes).
Here is a short video showing some of the most recent graphical changes including:

• improved water (slightly more detailed),
• improved clouds (they should appear at least a bit more natural),
• improved HDR rendering (a few new tone mapping operators and addition of star effect),
• addition of vintage like effects (I based them on photoshopping some of the photos).

I know the graphics are a bit out dated today but well... with such a long break it still isn't too bad I think (especially for the amateur ;) ).

Photomatix Pro 4.1 released!

Hi guys,

as we officially released Photomatix Pro 4.1 yesterday (check it here) I should now finally have some time for working on my master thesis and nGENE. Hope to write something more soon.

Photomatix Pro 4.1 Beta

Hi guys,

I wasn't writing anything in the past few months as I was quite busy with both my work and studies (there is not much left with my studies luckily :) ) and didn't have time to work on nGENE at all. Sorry dudes.

How to avoid flickering in the Windows application?

If you have ever programmed a windows based application (level editor for instance) in .NET you probably encountered one serious problem - GUI flickering or some other artifacts with controls being not properly refreshed or painted when the form is being loaded. If not, probably your GUI was rather simple and you will come across it at some point :)

A more interesting approach to black & white

Just a few days ago I described the effect to achieve a vintage look in the game. Today I will describe similar effect but it will join black & white and the vintage look techniques into one (a bit sepia like but as I don't like sepia very much I will describe something different). The problem with regular black & white is that it's rather cold in general. Cold images are not that pleasant for our eyes as warm images are. Vintage look effect can make the image warmer and make it more interesting and appealing. If you want to apply it be sure to take a look at the mentioned entry as this one will base on it.

Slideshow from Rome

Just a quick note on photography.

This February I had a chance to visit Rome and spent there a few days (amazing city!). During this stay I took hundreds (thousands to be honest ;) ) of photos and here is the compilation of some of them I found the best. I would suggest watching it in HD as it reveals much more detail. There are a lot of different shot types: HDRs, architecture, panoramas, tilt-shifts, detail/texture and even a few nature shots. I hope you will like it!

Vintage look

One of current trends in photography is trying to give a photo a vintage look. Not the black & white but rather pink & blue tone. With a photo editing suite it's just a matter of a few clicks. Recently I came up with an idea of porting this effect to HLSL as it is very interesting effect in my opinion (works very well not only to make image look older but also warmer).

My blog on photography

Hi again,

I've just started my blog on photography. You can find it under http://www.hdrphotographer.blogspot.com (not much for now but expect some tutorials in the next few days). From now on I will upload photography related content only there (and on Flickr). This blog will turn into more technical one i.e. I want to restore its primary form. I hope it's a good decision :)

nGENE as my master thesis

Hi all. I've been pretty busy in the last few months so there weren't many posts here (at HDRsoft we released Photomatix Light 2.0 during this period; it's a program for beginners in HDR photography).

I also have some news regarding nGENE. I proposed a subject "Design and implementation of 3D graphics engine for games and visualizations development" as my master thesis and it was accepted by my university. It means that I will finally have some time to work on nGENE. I will try to publish some technical entries about FX (I have a lot of ideas for new special effects with which I came while processing my photos), physics and architecture. I also hope to refactor large parts of it and implement some new features from scratch (I hope to finally play with DirectX 11). I also plan to release my master thesis once it is ready (although I will need to translate it to English).

New job and the end of adventure with GD?

I'm really happy to announce that for a few weeks now, I have a new job. I'm currently working as a Windows developer at the HDRSoft company, authors of the Photomatix Pro I use personally for some time to do my HDR shots (all recently presented here are tonemapped using it) and which I mentioned in my posts and comments once or twice (and a few dozen times on Flickr), last time in my tutorial. Actually I find it really satisfactory to work on a piece of software I use, I think that it's much more motivating and rewarding too than working on yet another web service you would never use for your personal work. At the same time I'm doing something really challenging this time as all image processing applications can be considered as such.

I also gave a lot of thoughts to my potential future in the game development industry throughout last few months and I made my thoughts finally on that. Although I like games, I like playing them, making them is a real challenge and pleasure... but I don't want to do that for a living I think. The working conditions in the industry are rarely satisfactory (salary is one issue but long hours are much bigger for me). It doesn't mean that I won't write anything about graphics here anymore - no, in my spare time I hope to present some effects and techniques but what I mean is that I'm not pursuing GD career anymore. I also have plans to create some indie games in the nearest future and when I have more time (I'm also doing my Masters now) go back to nGENE.

Two of my photos in Explore

Two of my photos have been recently Explored (i.e. they are in the daily top 500 according to their "interestingness") on Flickr. The photos were taken around February but I've uploaded them a few days ago. Both of them are HDRs taken from 3 photos at -2, 0, +2 exposures and tone-mapped in Photomatix. These are:

And

Back to nGENE development

Hi everyone. I had quite a long break from nGENE programming. I was a bit tired I must admit so I had to take a few weeks break from developing it. The A.I.A.D. game got quite a lot of critique after releasing the previous trailers, it was proof to me that I'm not any good at higher level (gameplay) programming :) that's true I prefer low-level coding :) I will work on it for a short time and release the code afterwards. The aim is not to make very good game but rather to proove that one can make games with nGENE already (I fixed dozens of bugs and that was the most important I guess).

I also started another project, at present it's very simple so there's nothing to show. It's a photo editing software (like GIMP or Photoshop you know). It turns out, it's quite simple and funny to do. Most of the tools and filters require no more than a few hours of work, some of them are quite challenging (I said it's funny :) ), a lot of maths is involved. Also the performance is crucial. When using GIMP for my larger photos it drives me mad when Gaussian Blur with radius set to ~50 takes sooooo much time :) some filters run for 5 and more minutes.

I would also like to thank everyone on their positive feedback on my HDR photography tutorial. I'm really glad you like it.

I'm also taking quite a lot of photos. I'm uploading them to Picasa no more but rather to Flickr. Here's some of them:


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

HDR photography tutorial

With my recent appearance on Flickr and uploading a bunch of my HDR photos (and B&W HDR photos) some people started to ask me questions like "what software do you use for HDR?" or "what settings do you use to achieve this effect?". I decided to write a tutorial on that to thank everyone on their positive feedback on my attempts. I'm definitely not a pro but I believe I got the HDR quite right and can share some thoughts on that.

New video from the nGENE sample game

Recently I was a bit busy (I was once again away then spent something like one week post-processing my photos) but in the last few days I've been working on the A.I.A.D game I mentioned here and here. I made a lot of improvements since the last video although the majority of them is not that obvious as they are mostly bug fixes and mechanics improvements. Regarding graphics I added a few special effects and a few more lights. I added also some sounds (be sure to turn your speakers on!). For this game I started to work seriously on the GUI and you can see the first version of it in this video:



I will go back to writing 'regular' entries in one to two weeks.

My photo to reach Exlore and Barcelona trip

On Flickr there's a special kind of ranking of all photos. It's called Explore. It includes 500 most interesting photos of a day (based on comments, views, faves, tags, title, everything). With thousands being uploaded every single minute it's a very small subset of what is added daily by the users. Really hard to get there. And I finally made it to get into it with this photo (view large if possible):

A.I.A.D.

As Inevitable As Death is a work title of the simple game I wrote about recently. The reason I'm writing again about that is that there's new video available. This time I improved existing weapons, added a few ones (eg. homing missiles), added a few new enemies and power-ups (slow-motion for instance), improved GUI a little, improved general graphics and physics, etc. A lot of changes also in the nGENE. The progress is quite big I think :)

A simple game using nGENE

In one of the last posts I mentioned that I'm making a small game using nGENE Tech. It's a top-down scroll shooter (I said it's simple, didn't I :) ?). Currently there is some gameplay, now I'm working on the graphics, adding more weapons, power-ups and enemies, adding sound, GUI etc. What I'm trying to achieve is to use as many of the features as possible thus showing them. I don't mean all those fancy effects I implemented to now but rather usage of different modules ;)

Here's a short video from an early version:

It's really an early version, I'm working on it only 1 to 3 hours a day but there are many a days when I'm not coding a single line as I do a lot of photography related things recently (just discovered real power of Flickr you know :) ) but it's a real fun to code even the simplest game.