GDC - Tuesday
I decided to do a blog post for each day that I'm at GDC so I can have a place to collect all the stuff that I learn each day and share the stuff that I think is cool with whoever wants to read it.
Tuesday was my long plane ride day. The ride was long so I watched Star Wars episode 4 on the first flight and Toy Story on my second flight. Movies on planes are nice. I used to hate flying until I was able to bring my own movies to watch. Now it's not so bad.
On the plane, I also did a little bit of thinking about how to structure a system of shaders for a next-gen graphics engine. I think it would be cool to create a standard list of shader inputs like normal, view vector, light vector, UVs, diffuse color, etc and then make each use a function call to be created. That way I could write lots of variations of functions for each input - like a normal function that combines multiple normal maps, a UV function that does offset mapping, etc. I could build a library of functions for each input type. The main body of the shader would be the lighting function - and I could build a library of different lighting models - blinn, phong, oren-nayar, etc. Then when I wanted to build a new shader, I could just combine all of my various functions to get the results I was looking for. If I couldn't get it with what I had, I could write some new functions and add them to the library. This type of system would allow new shaders to be built quickly, and make all of the shaders work together in an organized system. It's all just at the concept stage at this point, but I thought I'd throw it out there and see if anybody had any thoughts on it.
Neil Hazzard from Autodesk has asked me to give a short presentation on my shaders during his talk on Friday. It's going to be cool to show other people what I've been working on and meet some people that are working on similar projects. Neil also said that they might be showing a shader demo that I made at the Autodesk booth. Nice!
I hope to be able to log some of the interesting tid-bits that I learn on Wednesday in my next post.
Tuesday was my long plane ride day. The ride was long so I watched Star Wars episode 4 on the first flight and Toy Story on my second flight. Movies on planes are nice. I used to hate flying until I was able to bring my own movies to watch. Now it's not so bad.
On the plane, I also did a little bit of thinking about how to structure a system of shaders for a next-gen graphics engine. I think it would be cool to create a standard list of shader inputs like normal, view vector, light vector, UVs, diffuse color, etc and then make each use a function call to be created. That way I could write lots of variations of functions for each input - like a normal function that combines multiple normal maps, a UV function that does offset mapping, etc. I could build a library of functions for each input type. The main body of the shader would be the lighting function - and I could build a library of different lighting models - blinn, phong, oren-nayar, etc. Then when I wanted to build a new shader, I could just combine all of my various functions to get the results I was looking for. If I couldn't get it with what I had, I could write some new functions and add them to the library. This type of system would allow new shaders to be built quickly, and make all of the shaders work together in an organized system. It's all just at the concept stage at this point, but I thought I'd throw it out there and see if anybody had any thoughts on it.
Neil Hazzard from Autodesk has asked me to give a short presentation on my shaders during his talk on Friday. It's going to be cool to show other people what I've been working on and meet some people that are working on similar projects. Neil also said that they might be showing a shader demo that I made at the Autodesk booth. Nice!
I hope to be able to log some of the interesting tid-bits that I learn on Wednesday in my next post.
posted by Ben Cloward at 8:26 AM
3 Comments:
hey, man... came across your site, used wood41.jpg as a profile background, spent an hour trying to find something in google lol was just what I was looking for! thanks
Wow! Very nice work!
Thank you so much for sharing these patterns.
I make custom pool cues, and will use some of these to make unique pool cues!
Thanks again!
Chuck
Thanks so much!
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