Posts Tagged Tips
Reconstructing Position from Depth for Fullscreen Quads
Posted by Michael in Programming, Tips, directx, xna on June 29, 2010
Recently I found an issue with an older article of mine that covered this topic, so I pulled it down until I could find the time to understand and fix the issue. After a bit of work I have fixed it and present this refresh.
The key to deferred rendering and other techniques is the ability to use a depth map to store world position. As we know a depth map consists of floating point values (optimally) and so normally we would use those values with our Clip Space coordinates and the Inverse of the ViewProjection matrix to get the position in World Space.
However there is another way to do this, and the big benefit is that it does not require a matrix multiplication to do so.
Presented by Crytek during a presentation on Atmospheric Scattering, this method uses just a Multiply + Add to get the position in World Space from our depth value at that point. To do this we need to get the far view frustum corners, in View Space, and pass them to the shader.
Autodesk Student Subscriptions [Freebies]
I know that many of you will want to make use of either Blender or the nice free version of Softimage (Previously XSI) on the Creators Club website, however for those interested in expanding their skill set, perhaps with the intention of entering the industry, getting access to 3ds Max or Maya can be quite hard to do.* (legitimately)
I recently found that if you are a student and have an email address with your institution (.edu) then you can get access to licenses for Max, Maya, even AutoCAD and Revit for free using the Autodesk Student subscription.
Just go to http://students.autodesk.com to see if you qualify and register.
* I am not implying that 3ds Max + Maya are the only tools the industry uses, however they are the focus of this post.
Side Note: There are way too many versions of AutoCAD.