Shadow mapping is one of those things that a lot of people struggle with. It is also a very old shadowing technique that has been improved in a variety of ways. I'd like to make a brief trip trough the history of shadow mapping hopefully shedding some light on the topic and introduce you to some very nice techniques.

The problem of lighting 3D scenes in hardware accelerated rasterized rendering is really hard to solve. There are no 100% solutions, and what seems perfectly obvious to the uninitiated (light just bounces around) is extremely hard to do in practise. The following blog post is about one such method that I wanted to try out for a long time.

If you need to render trails you can use particles. These give nice puffy effect. At other times you'd like to have a more well defined line (like say for missile trails). The following post shows one technique render trails with a single triangle strip optimized not to use too many triangles and does not lead to the puffy look of particles.

There's a new device being kickstartered by Oculus VR and it's called Oculus Rift. It is virtual reality headset done right. I am really interested in this project, and I decided to back it with $300 and have a shot at getting a dev kit for it. Read on for why I find it so exciting.

I am writing a game (no link yet) and I need some assets. So the obvious thing to do is to parse some 3D file format and get the data out of it that I need. I have tried a couple of formats and implemented some, and the following article describes the file formats I've encountered and tried to use.

In part 2 of this series I explained about how to get the sky. This entry is about how to compute an irradiance environment map from this cubemap.

In Part 1 of this howto, I introduced my demo. In this part I'm going to talk about how to make the sky. The demo also computes an irradiance map and applies it to the cube. I'm going to talk about this in Part 3.

WebGL is now enabled by default in both Firefox 4.0 and Chrome 10.0, so I thought I give it a try and see what I can get out of it. The goal was to render some simple terrain, nice looking sky and waving grass. In this part of the description I will give the overview of how that works.

Since all the excitement about Minecraft I wondered what nice rendering effects could be done in such a restricted environment. I have decided to pursue that avenue of research and a variety of techniques will be presented in the following article.

I bought a new graphics card which is OpenGL 4.1 compatible. And since tessellation is hot, this article explains how to use tessellation to LOD large terrains easily.