3D
Anyone that think 3D movies is the future need to return to 1983 and Jaws 3-D
Anyone that think 3D movies is the future need to return to 1983 and Jaws 3-D
This section it about how to render 3D graphics. When you finally understand part of it someone has found a better way and you need to learn it again. The start out with 3D graphics look at the Learn 3D page. Enjoy.
Modelling
This is how the 3D data itself is represented. The most common way is to use polygons and many of the others end up using polygons to draw things in the end.
Constructive solid geometry - Make things by combining basic shapes
Landscape - The terrain of a game world.
Particle Systems - When you make it up of many small things
Patches - So you like math?
Polygons - Well, it's really mostly triangles now
Voxel - Minecraft and beyond.
Decal - Blood and graffiti
Pre Rendering
Culling - Choose what is visible so you do not have to send everything in the world to the graphics card.
LOD - If something is far away use less details to draw it.
Imposters - If something is Really far away use a image of it instead.
Billboard - Draw something that is always facing the camera. Used by particle system and imposters.
Materials
Texture - Images that you can use on objects and many other strange things.
Shaders - How the strange things are done with textures.
Material - The combination of shaders, textures and all other parameters to draw an object.
Shadows - How to find out if a light hits a part of a surface...
Lighting - ... and if it do how much light get there from the light.
Rendering
Architecture - How to design and setup the rendering part of a engine.
Deferred Rendering - Pick the order to cull, light and texture your surfaces.
Z-Buffer - How the hardware keep track of the distance to the things you draw.
Anti-aliasing - Try to hide the fact that you use small pixels to show things on the screen.
Ray tracing - Rendering where you start at each pixel and look out into the world to see what is visible at it.
Post Rendering
Post Process - Tweak your completed rendered image so it looks like you want it.
Other
Characters - You are used to look at people, that's what makes them hard to render.
Effects - What cool effects can you do. Learn how the classic ones was made.
Compute - Using compute on the GPU for rendering.
Game Articles - Articles about specific games or engines.
Settings
Get More From Your Games: A Beginner's Guide to Graphics Settings - 2013
Terminology Rant - 2008
Reference
The Perlin Problem: Moving Past Square Noise - 2022
Software Rasterization of 2 Billion Points in Real Time - 2022
Tech Focus: Nvidia DLDSR - What Does AI Downsampling Actually Do? - 2022
A Better Approach to SDF Decomposition - 2022
Moving, Rotating, and Scaling UVs - Shader Graph Basics - 2022
Adventures with Deferred Texturing in 'Horizon Forbidden West' - 2022
Permutation Coding for Vertex-Blend Attribute Compression - 2022
Exponentially Better Rotations - 2022
Authoring Efficient Shaders for Optimal Mobile Performance - 2022
DirectStorage API Now Available on PC - 2022
How to add thousands of lights to your renderer and not die in the process - 2022
Adventures in Hybrid Rendering - 2021
Bilinear down/upsampling, aligning pixel grids, and that infamous GPU half pixel offset - 2021
Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games - Siggraph 2021
The case of the curiously slow shader - 2021
The stack monoid revisited - 2021
Introduction to Computer Graphics - 2021
Inverse Z-Buffer - 2021
Graphics technique names - 2021
Hashing Space Hashing in an Arbitrary Grid - 2021
Organic Variety Making the Artificial Look Natural - 2021
Rendering numbers single quad - 2021
Rendering large 3D tilemaps with a single draw call at 3000 FPS - 2021
Distinctive Derivative Differences - 2021
Jonathan Ragan Kelley: Organizing Computation for High-Performance Visual Computing- 2021
Triangle Grid Triangles and Hexagons - 2021
Christmas Decoration for Graphics Engineers - 2021
Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer - 2021
Gradients in linear space aren't better - 2021
Moving Mobile Graphics - SIGGRAPH 2020 Course
SIGGRAPH 2020 Links - 2020
Happy New Year From Activision Research - 2020
Lima Oscar Delta! Scaling Content in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - 2020
Using Nsight Systems for Fixing Stutters in Games - 2020
Getting started with Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) - 2020
The Last of Us Part II, material blending, the SDF of a plane. - 2020
The Center of the Pixel is (0.5,0.5) - 2020
Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering - 2020
Why are video games graphics (still) a challenge? Productionizing rendering algorithms - 2020
Cameras and Lenses - 2020
Softening polygon intersections in Blightbound - 2020
Accelerating Unstructured Mesh Point Location with RT Cores - 2020
Performance speed limits - 2019
What has your microcode done for you lately? - 2019
Render Graph Optimization Scribbles - 2019
What's up with my branch on GPU? - 2019
Real-Time Continuous Level of Detail Rendering of Point Clouds - 2019
SampleZoo - Simple implementations of sampling patterns, with objective tests to compare them - 2019
Advances in Rendering, Graphics Research and Video Game Production - 2019
Halcyon: Rapid innovation using modern graphics – Reboot Develop 2019
3D Game Rendering 101 - 2019
Live Long and Render - 2019 - Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4, Part5, Part6 and Part7
Advances in Rendering, Graphics Research and Video Game Production - 2019
Mitsuba 2: A Retargetable Forward and Inverse Renderer - 2019
Checkerboard rendering, rotated anti-aliasing and grid frequencies - 2018
Interior Mapping: rendering real rooms without geometry - 2018
Shader Showcase Saturday #9: Interior Mapping - 2018
How to make a fake interior effect with unity using reflection probes - 2018
Readings on the State of the Art in Rendering - 2018
Intro to GPU Scalarization – Part 1 and Part 2 - 2018
Revisiting the Vertex Cache: Understanding and Optimizing Vertex Processing on the modern GPU - 2018
On-the-fly Vertex Reuse for Parallel Software Geometry Processing - 2018
Maximizing Rendering Efficiency - 2018
readings on the state of the art in rendering - 2018
Analyzing Modern Rendering - 2018
Real-World Measurements for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - 2018
HDR in Call of Duty - 2018
Turing Texture Space Shading - 2018
High-Performance Graphics 2018 - 2018
Shading Atlas Streaming - 2018
Automated Testing in Call of Duty - 2018
Mobile Graphics 101 - 2018
Making an animation 18 bytes at a time - 2018
4K Checkerboard in Battlefield 1 and Mass Effect Andromeda - 2017
The Poor Man's 3D Camera - 2017
Console quality game rendering on mobile - 2017
Should we get rid of Vertex Buffers? - 2017
FrameGraph: Extensible Rendering Architecture in Frostbite - 2017
radeonsi: out-of-order rasterization on VI+ - 2017
Depth Proxy Transparency Rendering - 2017
PIX Release 2008.26 – Our biggest update to GPU captures since - 2017
Rendering of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - 2017
Improved Culling for Tiled and Clustered Rendering in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - 2017
Emotion Challenge: Building a New Photoreal Facial Performance Pipeline for Games - 2017
Rendering to Texture - 2017
Efficient GPU Rendering of Subdivision Surfaces - 2016
Easy GPU Buffer updating wrapper - 2016
Wrapping up the Graphics Device - 2016
Efficient GPU Rendering of Subdivision Surfaces - 2016
ATVI-TR-16-02: Practical Order Independent Transparency - 2016
Color masks and occluders - - 2016
GPU-Driven Rendering Pipelines - 2015
GPU-Based Scene Generation for Flight Simulation - 2015
Iñigo Quílez Articles - 2015
GPU-driven rendering (SIGGRAPH 2015 follow up)
Frostbite on Mobile - 2015
Directed graph traversal, orderings and applications to data-flow analysis - 2015
Deferred improvements - 2015
Creating Content to Drive Destiny’s Investment Game: One Solution to Rule Them All - 2014
How to make a rendering engine - 2014
Deferred(ish) Rendering - 2014
The State of Rendering - 2013
Minimal setup screen space quads: No buffers/layouts required - 2012
Open Problems in Real-time Rendering - The Value of Pixel$ - 2012
Skeletal Animation Looping with Autocorrelation - 2012
What no one told you about the videocard: lagging 1 frame behind - 2011
Rendering Technology at Black Rock Studios - 2009
Building a Modern Engine for the Visual Simulation Industry - 2009
Animation and physics sitting in a tree - 2009
SceneTree's - 2009. The world is not a SceneTree , Characters are a special sort of tree but not a SceneTree , The world is... the world
Programmable vertex fetching and index buffering
SIGGRAPH 2021 Rendering Engine Architecture course
Tiled Reservoir Sampling for Many-Light Rendering
DirectStorage API Now Available on PC