Sandbox

Effects

Some of the effects I implemented were:

• Phong shading
• Texturing with diffuse and transparent textures
• Billboards
• Hardware instancing
• Image Blurring
• Tesselation of geometry
• Frustum culling with OBB
• Picking of meshes
• Environment mapping
• Normal and Displacement mapping
• Terrain tesselation
• Particle systems
• Shadow maps

Starting off

Something I struggled with at the beginning was how to approach the implementation. At first I started with reading the chapter on one subject and then implementing it as described in the book. Sometimes that would not really work resulting in an image clearly wrong but I was not sure where the problem was. Without experience it can be really hard to debug such problems.

After finishing the project I established a different routine when implementing something new. I start with the minimal working solution which creates a result on screen. After this I add more and more features and check if the output is ok. If something is not working correctly I use tools to verify the implementation.

Tools

For Debugging I found both the Visual Studio Graphics Debugger as well as RenderDoc really helpful. In general I prefer RenderDoc for several reasons:

• The overview of a frame is divided in passes e.g. depth-only or color pass
• pipeline state highlighting when something is missing
• buffer content format combinations possible
• overall better layout e.g. inspecting constant buffers while the pipeline state is still shown

Managing effects

One thing I really missed in the book were ideas how to manage all the different effects. Most of the examples are for one particular effect and the overall framework is designed with this kind of applications in mind. While this is obviously good to highlight only the relevant features bringing all together is a completely different story.

Putting everything together

The major problem which became apparent during the development was that I was missing a good structure to organize the drawing of the objects in scene with different effects. This made it increasingly complicated to add new shader effects as well as add the information needed to the objects and the drawing of a scene.

Most of this has to be rewritten to be made more scalable. Ideally the meshes would be sorted based on the needed effects and then after setting the effect the appropriate meshes are rendered. At the moment too much is still hard coded making the system not flexible enough.