Bachelor Project - Toy renderer

This is a toy/experimental real-time global illumination renderer written in C++ and using Direct3D 11. It's a hobby project, which means that it sometimes chooses the simplest options, and is perpetually a work in progress.

It started as part of my bachelor thesis where the goal was to create a real-time renderer that supported global illumination.

Features

• Deferred rendering
• Dynamic global illumination
  • Voxel cone traced diffuse lighting and specular reflection using anisotropic voxels
  • Compute shader pre-pass for "infinite" bounces
  • Screen-space specular occlusion to mitigate light leaking
  • Hardware and software conservative rasterization modes
  • Gap-filling compute pass to reduce light leaking
• Ambient occlusion
• PCF and PCSS shadows
• Emissive materials
• Normal mapping
• Material editor
• Built-in GPU timings
• Voxel visualizer

Project Overview

The project currently consists of:

1. A renderer, Bachelor, written in C++ using the Win32 API and Direct3D 11. Supported OSes: Windows only
2. A command-line tool, MeshBaker, which can parse .obj files to our custom format, written in C++. Supported OSes: Windows only
3. A command-line tool, Hemisphere, that can generate cones to cover the hemisphere, witten in C++. Supported OSes: Windows only

Installation

No installation is required for any of the binaries.
The command-line tools have no third-party dependencies.

bin\bachelor.exe requires Direct3D 11 and needs to be able to read from the bachelor\ folder that contains the assets.

Controls

• WSAD, Space, Ctrl - movement
• Mouse + Right mouse button- rotate the camera
• Middle mouse button - move slower
• F1 - toggle help window

Technical Notes

A lot of the technical details are covered in my thesis, see Chapter 4 (Architecture) and Chapter 5 (Design and Implementation). Chapter 7 (Results and Dicussion) analyzes the performance of the different render passes.

In addition, there's a global illumination overview post on my website.

Building from Source

Windows + Visual C++

The steps:

1. You will need Visual C++ 2013 or later installed.
2. Navigate to bachelor\misc.
3. Run gen.exe to generate Visual Studio project files for VS2013/2019^[a].
4. Navigate to vs2013 or vs2019 and compile the project.

a) Alternatively you can generate your own project files for other Visual Studio versions using genie.exe.

Notable Known Issues

• Bachelor

  • Voxel data structure is a dense grid. Could experiment with other structures for storing voxels, such as sparse voxel octress or cascaded voxel grids.
  • Short/long cone split in the bounce pass.^[McL15]
  • The bounce pass can be amortized over multiple frames to reduce the per frame computional expense.
  • Could trace cones for the bounce pass at a lower resolution and upscale.
  • The indirect diffuse contributes to a local fragment's specular response. Need to use another data structure to achieve true indirect specular.

  [McL15] As described by James McLaren. ‘The Technology of The Tomorrow Children’. In: GDC (April 2015).

• Meshbaker

  • The parser needs more work to make all .obj readable by bachelor.

Contact

Personal website: https://bjarkede.com
GitHub user: bjarkede

Bjarke#3697 @ Discord

Thanks

• myT (bitbucket)
• Sab0o

License

BSD 3-Clause License