Neutron Engine

I have implemented simple video capture so I can upload cut-scenes to the YouTube and promote engine features. Here is a sneak peak of what is coming, just a simple 320×200 compressed video. I will add more high resolution videos for each engine feature in the near future.

After a nice holiday it was time to add something new and cool to the engine. Volumetric clouds are very simple effect, ray tracing pixel shader using 3D density texture made with Perlin noise algorithm. Clouds can be of any shape, by default they are rendered as a box but some sort of ellipsoid shape would probably give even better results. Cloud shader supports specular highlights, fog (normally a horizon color) and self shadowing (clouds in general are darker at the bottom). The same shader can be used to render dynamic fog and even collision with objects can be added. Something new to add to the engine in the near future. Once again this shader is a perfect candidate for parallel calculation on DX11 using the shader model 5.

Update: volumetric clouds cast dynamic shadow onto the scene using the same approach as GPU fluid, after all it all comes down to volumetric rendering …

Volumetric clouds