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

Snow Effect in Google+ Photo

I didn't know Google+'s Auto Awesome mode does snow effects too. It was a pleasant surprise to find out what it did to a picture I took recently. It would make a good x-mas card :)

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:

How Much Canadian Programmers Make

I didn't know that Canada government publishes the salary survey information for programmers until today. But here it is.. this shows how much we, Canadian programmers, make for each region.

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)

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.

[Curiosity Research] Pet Fox

During this weeked, I stumbled into the following video showing a pet fox.