The showcase demo is also coming along nicely. Only a couple more weeks to go.

More details regarding the release can be found in the Amplify thread at the Unity Community Forums.

More info soon.

How exactly will Microsoft will handle deployment for such different platforms is up for speculation. Personally, I’m expecting a combination of immediate legacy x86 translation, short-term Mac style fat binary bundles and a big push towards pure .NET applications. I believe the latter is inevitable and a good bet for game development as a long term solution.

This is happening at a time where high performing 3D graphics are becoming ubiquitous in netbooks, tablets and even smartphones. Not only will these games run on every device and reach a wider and expanding market, they will also look amazing. This is where XNA comes in.

I’ve got a copy of “3D Graphics with XNA Game Studio 4.0” by Sean James (Packt Publishing) on the way:

According to the description, the book is “a step-by-step guide to adding the 3D graphics effects used by professionals to your XNA games”. I’ll be posting a review of this book soon for to those of you interested in learning a bit, or a bit more about XNA.

Learn more at:
http://diogo.codingcorner.net/amplify

Download Latest Version

After downloading and installing the package please take some time to read the Online Manual. Please file error reports, questions or suggestions using the Feedback Form.

This project is built by Insidious Technologies Lda, in partnership with Zona Paradoxal Lda.

In a remote town called Farmocolis, Uncle Bob asks for his nephew’s help to catch some oranges. Little Zoy thought it was a boring task so, to make things interesting, he decided to retrieve the oranges in a rather unusual way. Instead of using a basket to carry oranges like a normal person, he uses a helmet with a spring attached. The oranges bounce on his head and he doesn’t know where they’ll fall. They either fall in an empty zone which Zoy has to prevent it from happening or they will fall in their final destination, the truck with an insanely deep cargo area.

As time passes by Uncle Bob will give more and more oranges to Zoy and this is where the fun begins!

Workflow Overview (Full HD)


Scale Demo (Full HD)

Current features:
- Virtual textures up to 512K x 512K.
- Seamless integration with Unity Editor.
- Real-time WYSIWYG editing.
- Per-material diffuse+coverage, normal and glossiness textures.
- Per-material textures larger than 4K x 4K.
- Texture repeat / tiling.
- Trilinear filtering.

Q&A at Unity Community Forums

Public beta sign up will start towards the end of this month, Dec. 2010. The first beta build is planned for Q1 2011.

This project is built in partnership with Zona Paradoxal, Lda.

On the rendering side, ray marching on the 200x200x200 volume shows the amplitude of the maximum speed vectors:

A demo, including source code, can be found at the author’s website:
http://users.skynet.be/fquake/

It seems to be loosely based on irradiance volumes, instant radiosity and photon mapping. Part of this clever approach was presented by Alex Evans back at Siggraph 2006, where he discussed fast lighting approximations using irradiance slices. Anton Kaplanyan, who developed this technique at Crytek, went even further by improving quality and tackling scalability issues.

Instant radiosity works by using virtual point lights to approximate global illumination. To get decent quality out of IR, hundreds (if not thousands) of virtual point lights need to be generated. Kaplanyan opted for reflective shadow maps, a GPU friendly way of generating VPLs. Due to high fillrate demands, however, even deferred lighting wasn’t fast enough for the huge number of VPLs required. This is where light propagation volumes (or radiance volumes) came in very handy.

VPL SH-based radiance info is injected into the radiance volumes using point based rendering. Light is then propagated in the volume using the computed outgoing radiance flux. During the lighting pass the volume textures can be sampled directly, anywhere in the scene, in order to generate the lighting contribution, at each point, from the SH coefficients. Check the paper for a detailed explanation of the process.

Normal mapped surfaces, and even glossy reflections, are supported. Cascaded volumes are used when dealing with larger scenes. To improve the quality for local, more high frequency details, this approach is combined with screen space global illumination.

The performance, even on consoles, is very good and fairly stable due to the nature of the technique. Quality should scale very well with memory/hardware.

All in all, a very fast, current-gen, console-friendly approach to diffuse GI for dynamic scenes.

That said, I am currently “on holiday”, arranging my move back to Portugal. My personal work is on hold; I’ll get back to it as soon as I have some stability.

Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in discussing business opportunities.

The first step was to build a framework to read and process scene information. I decided to go for FBX; turns out the sdk is a bit dodgy but functional. The next step was to build an acceleration structure and a raytracing core and this is what I’m working on right now. Here’s the first image with basic diffuse lighting and shadows from a point light:

It took around 3.8 seconds at 140K rays/second (including shading). I have my Centrino Duo mobile CPU down clocked to 1GHz because of overheating; this will force me to optimize the raytracing core before I can start investing time on something like path tracing. The next step is to replace the Octree with a KdTree or BVH with both mono and packed ray traversal. My goal is to achieve a minimum of 2 million rays/second per-core on the same scene.