I'm developing the lightmapping/radiosity part...this is far from being complete; the new graphic pipeline is almost ready, even if there are some issues here and there...
But tonight I wanted to develop some useful shaders with Fx Composer...
SSAO
Light Pre-Pass
The power of Hydra is that it has 1to1 Fx Composer/InEngine shader graphics: I'm using CgFx library to parse and create the shaders, I found really easy to use but yet powerful. So creating shaders for Hydra is just a matter of time: open FxComposer, create the project, compile...then simply copy the file onto the shader directory, create a material with it...DONE!
There were two great techniques I was impressed by: Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and Light Pre-Pass renderer.
The first was developed by Crytek in 2007, adding a great realism to the scenes because of the use of the ambient term in the lightning equation (always set to a constant-flat value). This calculation is done entirely in realtime, and even if it is something not much performant on many machines, there are plenty of them that can handle this beautiful effect...
The second technique is a renderer design created by Wolfgang Engel : it is a mid point between forward and deferred rendering...really really impressive! It lets you separate light from geometry affected by it, simply rendering the normals and depth to a buffer, then render all the lights needed, then use the forward rendering paradigm using the light buffer for lightning calculation. Even if I have some problems with it, and I've modeled only the diffuse term of the lightning equation, I'm really satisfied tonight.
Take care...
