Aqsis Renderer : Blog

Point based global illumination

2011-06-02T14:00:00.006+01:00

It's been a while since I last posted here, so I thought I'd post an update. I'm sure people are interested in the new core, but unfortunately real life (ie., desperately trying to finish my PhD) has got in the way so I have had limited time in the last several months.While progress has been slow in that area, there's been a recent need for more advanced illumination techniques, and since this

Depth of field and motion blur in aqsis-2.0

2010-12-08T12:24:00.005Z

In the last few weeks I've been working on getting motion blur and depth of field rendering working in the new aqsis-2.0 rendering core. It more or less works now, so I thought I'd post an update on the progress along with another screencast:The method I've chosen to use so far is called "interleaved sampling" as nicely described in "Data-Parallel Rasterization of Micropolygons with Defocus and

Interactive rendering with the aqsis-2.0 core

2010-11-01T00:10:00.007Z

This blog has been pretty quiet for a while, but aqsis development has been coming along behind the scenes. During the aqsis-1.6 development last year I focussed a lot on making aqsis faster. After working on this for a while it became obvious that some major changes were needed for the code to be really fast. In particular, the aqsis sampler code is geared toward dealing with single

Giselle Source Available

2010-01-06T13:24:00.003Z

I finally stopped tinkering and delaying, the source to Giselle is now available from the Aqsis SourceForge git storage. It's in its own repository, as I believe this tool could become quite big over time, so didn't want to overload the Aqsis repository.You can get the source from git using...git clone git://aqsis.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/aqsis/giselleBuilding shouldn't be too difficult once

Another Update

2010-01-05T15:22:00.003Z

Long overdue, I've been promising this for a while, but each time I'm about ready I think of something else to change. This one doesn't look drastically different from the last, the main change in the interface is the tabbed editor, which allows you to keep multiple model's code open simultaneously. However, there have been many many changes under the hood.Hopefully this will be the last before

Quick screencast

2009-11-30T14:43:00.001Z

Just a quick (and boring I'm afraid) screencast of the new interface. No sound this time, as my mic is awful, until I get a headset.

As promised...

2009-11-26T16:14:00.004Z

As eluded to in the last post, here is a quick sneak peek of the GUI I'm working on for the new Lua based animation system. It's been created in Qt using the new QtCreator IDE, which I have to say is a very nice system for building cross platform GUI applications.Key elements are...Multi-window design using Qt's docking facilities. The Avar table, OpenGL preview and time control can all be

Moving on from Io

2009-10-30T15:38:00.004Z

After the excitement of my last post I've had to abandon Io as my language of choice. While it has a beautifully succinct syntax, it proved to be a bit slow for my plans.I spent some time looking for alternatives that could provide the same, or similar, level of flexibility and control, without the speed implications. My research led me eventually to Lua. I'd already looked at Lua some time ago,

Io...Io...It's off to work we go...

2009-05-06T12:50:00.007+01:00

I've been working on a binding for RenderMan to the Io scripting language. My plans are to make this a default scripting language for generating content for Aqsis for the following reasons.Io has a very clean and simple syntax, making it really easy to pick up for anyone who has a modicum of programming/scripting experience.It is very easy to write extensions to Io, as shown by the RenderMan

Ongoing Optimisation Effort

2009-04-08T15:27:00.004+01:00

Just a quick update to show that we (the developers) aren't just sitting around doing nothing. We've been very busy over the last few months trying to identify and improve the performance issues with Aqsis.We've hit some major obstacles on the way, and have often found ourselves going two steps backwards instead of one forwards. The positives to be taken are that the changes we are making are

Aqsis GUI

2008-03-25T16:42:00.008Z

A recent addition to the Aqsis toolsuite comes in the form of a small GUI application which allows quick/simple access to our (most commonly used) tools...This is useful to both new users, who sometimes struggle with commandline-based applications, as well as existing users looking for a faster/alternative way into Aqsis.A functional version has been committed to our SVN repository (revision 2005

Improved Texture Filtering

2007-05-15T13:36:00.001+01:00

It seems Aqsis has a few problems with texture filtering at present, with some complaining of too much blurring, so I've been hacking 'texturemap.cpp' over the last few weeks to find a better solution.Texture access can be achieved using several methods. For realtime graphics, 'Trilinear' and 'Bilinear' filtering have been popular because they give reasonable results quite quickly, though it's

Advanced Framebuffer

2007-05-13T11:13:00.000+01:00

Work is currently underway on a new standalone framebuffer to compliment the Aqsis toolset, offering greater functionality than our existing effort...Though only in the early stages of development it's already looking very promising, and a definite improvement over the standard framebuffer - Even in its present state!While the featureset's still subject to change the following is planned...

Reflection Without Raytracing

2007-01-03T22:43:00.000Z

Further to my recent IBL experience, I decided to write a simple texture-based 'surface' shader for use in situations where reflection is desired - A common work-around due to the expensive nature of raytracing.../* Simple environment-mapping shader */surfaceenvmap(float Ka = 1,Kd = 1,intensity = 1.0;string texturename = "";float blur = 0.01;){point Nf = faceforward (normalize(N),I);if (

Image-based Lighting

2006-12-30T19:25:00.000Z

I recently thought I'd have a go at writing an IBL shader to compliment a new 'Howto' currently underway for Aqsis... in a similar vein to my previous 'Armageddon' work.Though shader authoring isn't my forte I was willing to have a go, plus had a free weekend, so armed with Google and the RISpec (3.2) I proceeded to create a simple 'light' (not 'surface') shader which uses a texture within its