Realtime Rendering Assessment 1 - Practical Artefact

heyyo!

Usage/Controls

If you run the application as is, you should end up in a demo scene. On your right is a mini window showing some scene statistics. Once you focus the window, your mouse will be locked to the center.

Use the mouse to look around, and WASD to walk.

You can use the number keys (not the numpad) 1-6 to view different render passes:

1. ASCII shader full post processing
2. Untouched colour pass
3. Normal pass
4. Depth pass
5. Sharpened post processing
6. Ambient occlusion pass

Press V to toggle VSync. Press ESC to release the mouse.

When you've had enough of looking around the scene on foot, you can press TAB to enter debug/fly mode.

When in debug/fly mode, you can move up and down (relative to the camera) using Q/E. Hold shift to move faster. You can use TAB to go back to walk mode (walk mode camera position is preserved).

While in debug/fly mode, you gain a debug overlay which is drawn on top of the post processing, showing the transforms of each object (emptys, meshes, cameras, lights).

Also while in this mode, you can actually edit the scene! First, click to select an object (based on bounding boxes). Now you can use G followed by mouse movement to move an object around. R to rotate, F to scale. Click to confirm each operation, or press escape to cancel.

Features

Lighting

• point, spot, and directional lights
• up to 8 lights in total
• realtime shadow maps (functional for spot and directional lights)
• lights as scene objects (can be transformed, parented, etc)

Shading

• Phong shading using albedo texture for surface colour
• use of both solid and wireframe rasterisers
• use of both triangle (for normal meshes) and line (for debug gizmos) assembler modes
• normal mapping using normal texture
• PBR-based uber-shader, following maths from [https://learnopengl.com/PBR/Theory]

Scene Graph

• transform/object heirarchy
• transform class capable of translation, rotation, and scale, both in local and world space
• camera, light, and mesh classes

Resource Manager

• custom OBJ file loader, capable of computing tangents for use with normal mapping
• material configuration system using JSON and DirectX11 shader reflection system
• scene loader from JSON file (includes scene graph, automatic loading of dependencies like textures, meshes, materials, shaders)
• custom JSON parser, used by above
• global resource manager class for managing loading/unloading GPU resources (textures, meshes, shaders) and materials, preventing duplication

Miscellaneous Features

• full-screen-quad-based post-processing (including a sophisticated ASCII dithering shader)
• fog (implemented in post-processing)
• sharpen filter (implemented in post-processing)
• skybox (implemented in post-processing)
• support for multiple render passes sent to the post processing shader (colour, normal, depth, AO)
• object shader and material sorting to minimise context switches required
• viewport resizing at runtime
• simple object manipulation with user input
• screen space ambient occlusion, using maths from [https://learnopengl.com/Advanced-Lighting/SSAO]
• (INCOMPLETE) frustrum culling based on object bounding boxes

Credits

Every part of the project is created by me, aside from:

• DDSTextureLoader.h/.cpp, supplied by the course
• Skybox background is a modified version of NASA's 2020 Deep Star Maps (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4851/); NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Constellation figures based on those developed for the IAU by Alan MacRobert of Sky and Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott and Rick Fienberg).