Posts

Render Graphs, or “Task Graphs,” rapidly became the standard in the industry ever since Yuriy O’Donnell’s 2017 GDC presentation on Frostbite’s FrameGraph. They provide many benefits, like handling all of the synchronization barriers and resource transitions, reordering tasks for increased performance, reducing memory usage via resource aliasing, and the list goes on for miles. They’re nearly mandatory for large projects these days, given how verbose and error-prone these things would be if done manually with modern APIs like Vulkan and DX12....

Asset pipelines are one of the pieces of game development I don’t see people talk about very often. The main concepts are often introduced and chatted about theoretically, sure: “convert your assets into binary packages, compress them, and load them at runtime,” but rarely do I find people chatting about the implementation details. It always strikes me as a little odd, because I’d argue it has the single biggest impact on development....

In this post, I want to explain how to take a normal map and generate its corresponding height map (also called displacement map). There are multiple ways to achieve this, but the one I’ll be covering in this post is the method that Danny Chan presented in Advances in Real Time Rendering at Siggraph 2018 (link here, page 16). It’s also the same method that the Call of Duty engine still uses today to generate the vast majority of its height maps....