Tuesday, March 31, 2009

GDC'09: Shadows & Decals - D3D10 techniques from Frostbite

Daniel's and mine GDC'09 presentation titled Shadows & Decals - D3D10 techniques from Frostbite that was in the Advanced Visual Effects with Direct3D for PC full day tutorial is now online! (pdf)

The rest of the tutorial slides can be found here

I talked about our shadowmapping technique which I creatively call Single-pass Stable Cascaded Bounding Box Shadow Maps (SSCBBSM?). It uses a combination of bounding box slice selection, geometry shader & instancing rendering to maximize shadowmap resolution usage and render with as little CPU overhead as possible.

Daniel talked about Decal Generation using the Geometry Shader and Stream Out which is a technique to project and generate decals directly on the GPU to avoid having to duplicate mesh vertex & index buffers into system memory or have to do the vertex & triangle projection on the CPU. It is a pretty cool usage of the GS and something we think will enable more intricate geometry processing than just standard decals in the future.



I also did a list minute presentation in the AMD talk Your Game Needs Direct3D 11, So Get Started Now! about our experiences, motivation and goals of porting & supporting Direct3D 11 in Frostbite. Slides should be up soon!