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Lessons Learned from Voxel Editing

I have been looking into voxel editing stuff on and off recently, and this is a short(or long) list of practical lessons I learned. All the factual information presented here is already available online. I'm just gathering and summarizing them here with my 2 cents.
- Dec 2, 2013
Blendable RGBM

What is RGBM? Using a fat buffer(16 bit-per-channel) is the most intuitive way to store a HDR render target, but it was too slow and it used too much memory, so we decided to encode(pack) it into a 8 bit-per-channel buffer. There are different packing methods, but I believe the most widely used method was RGBM. (also this link has a nice summary of LogLUV too, so give it a read if you are not familiar with this topic at all)
- Nov 25, 2013
Mipmap Quality

So mipmaps are often blurry and artists think we are bunch of morons making their awesome artwork so blurry.. :-) You know, most of the time we see lower mips all the time in the game. It depends on camera settings, but I found it's very rare that we see highest mip in most of the games out there.
- Jun 24, 2013
PIMPL Pattern - Me No Likey

I haven't used the PIMPL pattern so far. I remember reading about it once long time ago, but was just not convinced it's something I want.
- May 21, 2013
Goodbye XNA, Hello SharpDX

I've been using XNA since the beginning. I liked this platform a lot because it allows me to write something that runs both on PC and Xbox 360. And it is even possible to monetize your games on Xbox 360 Indie Games channel. However, the importance of XNA games on Xbox Live turned out to be very minimal, and MS changed XNA a lot to support Windows Phone 7.0. From that moment, (XNA 4.0 I believe), XNA became somewhat awkward. PC and Xbox 360 became second-class citizens, i think.
- Jan 9, 2013
Another Useless Meeting

I don't remember exactly, but I think it was a presentation on how Apple works internally. A few key points I thought cool:
- Jan 3, 2013
01. What is Shader

Definition of Shader The very first question I used to get in my class was "what the heck is shader?" Looking back, I also asked this same question when I heard about shader first few times, but no one was able to give me the one sentence explanation that made sense to a noob like me. I eventually figured it out, and I think the following sentence is the easiest way to define what shader is.
- Dec 31, 2012
00. Introduction

This book is a collection of lecture materials I developed and used to teach a shader programming course at the Art Institute of Vancouver between 2007 and 2009.
- Dec 29, 2012
[Slides] Relic's FX System

I totally forgot to share this. It's presented at KGC 2012 by my ex-coworker, Daniel Barrero. I had to nag him enough to prepare this.. so I'll take a tiny bit of credit :)
- Dec 3, 2012
SSD height-based fade-out effect by ttmayrin

I just heard from a Korean game developer, ttmayrin, who implemented Screen Space Decals in his engine and he loves it. The only problem he had was how the decal border was too obvious because my implementation used in Space Marine lacks any smoothing effect.
- Nov 18, 2012