Curious in knowing who’s attending the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Also, which sessions (from a graphics-standpoint) seemed most interesting.
There’s always too many to choose from, so I’m trying to decide now what I want to attend.
Wish I could :/.
But hopefully, like always, the slides will get posted for us non-GDC’ers.
Wish I could go too. This one sounds cool:
“Optimized Stenciled Shadow Volumes”
Cass Everitt (Nvidia)
Realistic volumetric shadows are rare in 3D games today, but this will soon change. The surest indication of this trend is id Software’s upcoming DOOM III engine that uses stenciled shadow volumes to cast volumetric shadows within its dynamic game environment.
While stenciled shadow volumes are robust, relatively artifact free, and supported by all recent GPUs, the performance requirements for naively rendering stenciled shadow volumes are substantial both in terms of CPU cost for computing possible silhouette edge loops and the quite substantial GPU fill-rate required for rendering the shadow volumes. Programmers integrating the stenciled shadow volume technique into their 3D engines must learn about fast algorithms for possible silhouette edge loop determination, shadow volume culling and scissoring techniques, and new hardware features designed to further
accelerate stenciled shadow volume rendering.
This lecture describes these various practical optimizations needed to make stenciled shadow volumes suitable for real games. Attendees also learn how to integrate stenciled shadow volumes into both dungeon-like (interior) and outdoor (exterior) scenes. Many developers will be surprised to learn that stenciled shadow volumes are better suited to outdoor scenes than interiors.
If cass is listening, any chance you could expand on that last sentence?
If it is the same what he told at the Dawn to Dusk two weeks ago he talks about the robust shadow volumes paper and adds some more extra stuff, like the interesting possibility of using negative w-Coords (look for an discussion on the board).
It was a very interesting presentation, and will shurly be usefull for anyone interested in using shadows in his project.
Lars