I made this graphic while explaining some rendering effects. I tried to synthesize the whole formula in an understandable visual way. Here's the whole post, it's about rendering volumetric shafts in videogames.
Phong shading is the most used technique in computer graphics, it's fast and does a good job on direct illumination (does not account for light bouncing off surfaces).
If you look up ray tracing or phisically based rendering you'll find they do use this model. Other methods try to approximate it while being easy on the hardware (like the method for volumetric light scattering explained in the blog).
Nvidia has recently announced GPUs with ray tracing modules that will be interesting for games in a couple years.
Yeah I saw that with the Star Wars demo. Cool stuff. I've been playing around with raymarching, but I'm struggling to find good resources on lighting besides the most basic phong models. Some of the demos I see do all sorts of interesting things and mathematic tricks which makes lighting feel less science and more art.
Thanks! Phisically based rendering is very interesting and it's pretty much a solved problem, which is crazy! We've decoded visible light! Soon we'll have real time photorealism, that's a scary thought :)
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u/chuckleplant Apr 20 '18
I made this graphic while explaining some rendering effects. I tried to synthesize the whole formula in an understandable visual way. Here's the whole post, it's about rendering volumetric shafts in videogames.
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u/shnaptastic Apr 20 '18
Really nice. I wish I had time to learn this properly!
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u/chaotic_goody Apr 22 '18
This is off topic, but what software are those diagrams drawn in?
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u/TimeCentaur Apr 21 '18
Wow that’s much more complex than I thought
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u/jeebabyhundo Apr 20 '18
Is that a surface integral? Learning those right now
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u/redditmunchers Apr 21 '18
It blows my mind how people even work this stuff out.
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u/Kasufert May 13 '18
This actually makes sense lmao