Real-Time shadows : Point Light Shadows Demo

I have uploaded a video demo for Point Light Dynamic shadows with sponza scene containing 32 point lights with dynamic shadows.

 

 Render Timings

Some performance results at resolution 1080p (as rendered in the above screenshot) –

• Depth Pass – 0.410 ms
• ShadowMap Update – 2.1 ms
• Lighting Pass (With 32 dynamic shadows) – 5.5 ms
• Lighting Pass (With 32 static shadows) – 4.9 ms

 

Real-Time shadows : Cascaded Shadow Maps

Cascaded Shadow Maps is so far the best solution to tackle Perspective and Projective aliasing in shadows. The basic idea is to use multiple shadow maps (mostly 3 or 4) to cover different areas of view camera frustum. The root cause of these shadow artifacts is lack of one to one mapping between shadow map texels and pixels on the screen (in view space). The Cascaded Shadow mapping provides higher resolution shadow maps  to objects closer to the eye solving the root cause of artifacts.

 

(Screenshot – JustAnotherGameEngine)

Making Everything Darker : Real-Time Shadows

Shadows are one of the key features for creating realistic and believable virtual scenes. Whether hard or soft or physically correct, shadows are very crucial in providing important visual cues. Shadows can be an important aspect of gameplay also. For example, it plays an important role in CounterStrike by allowing us to see enemies around corners, coming through doors, etc.

Real-Time Shadows is an active area of research. There’s still no single fool-proof technique of rendering shadows that can handle all the cases. Well, there exists a way to render high quality physically correct shadows through ray-tracing but that’s not fast enough to render in real-time on current hardware. So a better way to say this is that there’s no real-time hack of rendering high quality, flicker/ jaggies free, physically correct, etc shadows yet.

Progress Update

From past 7-8 weeks I have been mainly working on shadows along with some engine code refactoring, adding support for some new things to support shadows like Texture arrays, Geometry shaders, etc

Deferred Rendering : Transparent Materials

Implemented support for Transparent Materials using Forward+ path. Even though it’s working I am not sure to go through a whole separate Forward+ rendering pass for transparent materials is the right way to go. I am thinking to test some other algorithms like Inferred Rendering, OIT or stochastic transparency, etc.

But before that I will be testing performance of proper Deferred Rendering with fat GBuffers vs Forward+. Right know I am using 3 32 bit GBuffers for Albedo, Normal and Specular (and yes 32bit Depth Buffer). In my current implementation I am getting 650+ fps in Deferred Rendering path and 350+ fps in Forward+ with 1024 dynamic point lights in sponza scene.

Deferred Rendering : Forward Plus – Sponza

Finished Forward Plus rendering path, its working for opaque surfaces only for now but I am planning to use it for transparent surfaces and for any special shaders required later. I think it would be interesting to do some comparisons b/w Deferred Shading & Forward Plus.

Deferred Shading : Sponza Model

Here’s the sponza model rendered with 1024 dynamic point lights –

I am getting 650+ (650-900) fps in this scene depending upon how many lights are in the view and how many lights end up per tile. This is with Depth Prepass, which gave a boost of approx 150 fps in this scene.

Note – These results are without any optimizations on application side. – no frustum Culling, no sorting,data of all the lights is being updated perframe, etc.

Some more screenshots –

Albedo

Normals

NumLights per tile

Only Lights

Final Result

Deferred Shading – More Lights

Tested 1024 Dynamic Point Lights. These screenshots have been Captured in Debug Mode. For performence test I am working on importing Sponza Model.

Final Result

WIP: Deferred Rendering

I recently started working on JustAnotherGameEngine again. Although ToneMapping was left incomplete in april I have started on Deferred Rendering for now.Plan is to do ToneMapping after this so that I would have some test scenes with lights rather than just HDR skybox. Because I feel its more difficult to do Tonemapping properly in a 3D scene with multiple dynamic light sources or varying luminosity rather than just a skybox and will be a good test while testing different tone mapping operators.

WIP: HDR Rendering – ToneMapping using Compute Shader

I worked on a basic naive implementation of HDR rendering few months back using old DX9 style pixel shaders. Actually I have a lot of old experimental shaders created in Nvidia FX Composer long back (tone-mapping, physically based BRDFs, etc) and I integrate them to the engine as required providing backend support in c++ code and improve on them as necessary using Direct3d11 features. So that old pixel shader based ToneMapping shader was one such example.  It was not so great either in quality or the performance but not so bad for first implementation. Here are the rendering stages involved in that implementation : –