Approximating water effects using terrain height maps part 1: Reflections

• discusses screen space reflection and planar reflections techniques
• presented technique for reflections uses ray-marching against the terrain height map to calculate the reflections
• show that the technique could be extended to trace against signed distances fields to add reflection for other objects too

Decoding a projection matrix

• show how a projection matrix is formed
• explains GPU clipping and how it relates to the projection matrix
• many videos explain the significance of each component visually
• provides a calculator to help gain a more intuitive understanding

[twitter] texture minification using mip-mapping

• twitter thread discussing mip-map selection algorithms
• comparison between the custom shader implementation and hardware solution

An Intro to Physically Based Rendering for Artists and Programmers - Part 1

• introduction into physically based shading
• presents how light is reflected and refracted when it comes into contact with surfaces
• shows how metal and dielectrics (non-metals, insulators) interact with light differently and how this forms the visual perception of different materials

Evenly Distributing Points in a Triangle

• presents a technique to distribute an infinite sequence of points on the surface of an arbitrary triangle evenly

De-gamma your texture kid!

• the article points out that albedo textures are commonly stored in sRGB color space and need to be converted into linear color space before using in shading
• achieved using the correct SRGB texture format
• comparison images present the differences between sRGB and non-sRGB color formats

Realistic Rendering Approaches for Snow Covers

• thesis presentation covering snow rendering
• presents the visual features of snow with real-world reference pictures
• an overview of existing techniques
• defines 4 defining characteristics for snow shading and develops a BRDF from them

'Infinite' sky shader for Unity

• a short post that shows how to make an object appear infinitely large without clipping artifacts
• adjusts the vertex position in the vertex shader so that they are mapped onto the far plane

Directional Shadows Cascaded Maps

• extends the custom scriptable rendering pipeline, the previous part was covered in issue 66
• now adds support for directional shadows, such as sun shadows
• shows how to deal with common shadow artifacts
• implements cascaded shadow mapping for the main directional light

Technically Art: Issue 3 (01.02.2019)

• weekly series with twitter posts about tech art techniques and ideas

Getting Started Learning Tech Art & Unity Shader Writing

• summary of resource about getting started with tech art
• mainly unity shader focused

PIX 1901.28 – Timing Data Improvements and support for new GPUs

• new PIX for windows version
• performance counters are now supported on AMD Radeon 7 GPUs and NVIDIA Turing GPUs
• more consistent and reliable timing data on all GPUs