Re: Architecting and programming a graphics engine in C++ & OpenGL

At 02:02 PM 3/20/2011, Jon Watte wrote:
>In this context:
>I've found that engineers who want to talk and 
>think only about the most cutting edge shading 
>techniques are generally not as useful to a 
>greater organization than an engineer who can 
>work intelligently in this area, but also understands the needs of a business.
>For example, someone who can write a graphics 
>engine that scales from a GMA 950 to a GTX 580 
>is a lot more valuable to me than someone who 
>can shave a HLSL instruction out from a 
>multi-basis global illumination approximation 
>shader, that only will run on that GTX 580 in the first place.
>Similarly, actually getting the math of graphics 
>right is a lot more important than any particular detail knowledge.
>Â
>Here are some questions that matter a lot to me, 
>and drive the overall design of a rendering 
>engine, even though they are generally derived from the basic math of graphics:
>Â
>What are the different coordinate spaces, and 
>how do you transform between them?
>What are some examples of work that's done in these different spaces?
>What's the difference between global vs local illumination, anyway?
>What happens to the tangent space when you skin an animated character?
>How do you blend animations without artifacts?
>How do you make skinned character armpits not 
>look like ass when applying blended animations or rag-doll kinetics?
>Which rendering techniques to make things look 
>better that use artist hinting do you use?
>How can you make the artist hinting process as foolproof as possible?
>What is an "inverse bind pose?"
>Where in the content pipeline does it get applied?
>If you support both vertex morphing (blend 
>target animation) and skinning (bone blending 
>animation), does this change the answers?
>Why is it wrong to calculate dynamic ambient 
>occlusion in screen space? What are some alternatives?
>Why is it wrong to blur dynamic shadows in 
>screen space? What are some alternatives?
>Â
>You'd be surprised how many "shader experts" would get half of these wrong :-(


Those are fantastic questions. It is crazy how 
much domain knowledge is primarily concerned with character modelling.


Here is another tricky question that I happen to like a lot:

What is the correct way to convert features of a 
scene from one coordinate system to another?


Cheers,
Darren

_______________________________________________
Sweng-Gamedev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com