06. Love Cartoons? Here's Toon Shader

New HLSL in this chapter ceil(): finds the smallest integer value greater than the input parameter.

05. Let's Add Colors to Objects: Diffuse/Specular Shader

Why do different objects have different colors? It is because they absorb and reflect different spectrums of incoming light. For example, a black surface looks black because it absorbs all the spectrums, and a white surface is white because it reflects everything. Likewise, a red surface reflects red spectrum while absorbing the others.

Future of Intro to Shader Programming Book

I have been posting the English version of my Intro to Shader Programming book in this blog. I intended to publish it some years ago, but I had more important things to occupy myself. I thought it was a bit too late to publish this book, but I got lucky this time.

04. Basic Lighting Shader - Part 2

Specular Light

04. Basic Lighting Shader - Part 1

New HLSL in this chapter NORMAL: a shader semantic used to retrieve normal data from a vertex buffer normalize(): normalizes a vector dot(): dot product function saturate(): clamps a value to [0, 1] range reflect(): vector reflection function pow(): raises base to the power of exponent

03. Texture Mapping

New HLSL in this chapter sampler2D: a texture sampler data type which is used to get a texel from a texture tex2D(): a HLSL function to sample a texel from a texture swizzling: a way to access the components of a vector in an arbitrary order

02. It's Really Easy! Red Shader! Red Shader

New HLSL in this chapter float4: a vector data type with 4 components float4x4: 4 X 4 matrix data type mul(): multiplication built-in function. Can handle almost all data types POSITION: Semantic for vertex position. Useful to read only the position info from vertex data

CUDA Compile Error MSB3721 with Exit Code 1

So I finally decided to play with CUDA a bit. I love Visual Studio, so I created a CUDA project in VS2012(CUDA SDK doesn't support VS2013 yet) and tried to compile it. But uhoh.. I got this error:

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.

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)