Talks, Posts, Papers and more for Graphics and (Game) Engine Development

Graphics and Engine development.md

Index

This list is an attempt to collect as many free resources about computer graphics- / rendering- techniques, game- / render-engine architecture and optimization techniques. This list doesn't contain every resource that is out there so it'll be expanded in time whenever I find another resource that may help one person or the other.

Rendering Techniques

• Terrain rendering and texturing
• Volumetric rendering
• Ocean and Water Rendering
• Raytracing
• Reflections
• Voxels
• Global Illumination
• Vegetation Rendering
• Atmosphere Rendering
• Animation
• Post Processing
• Text Rendering
• Order-Independent Transparency
• Shadow Mapping
• Anti Aliasing

APIs

• Vulkan
  • General Tutorials
  • Synchronization
  • Memory
  • Descriptors
  • Compute
  • Code Samples
  • Specification
• OpenGL
  • General Tutorials
  • Code Samples
• DirectX 12
  • General Tutorials
• DirectX 11
  • General Tutorials
• DirectX 10
  • General Tutorials

Engine Development and General Techniques

• General Techniques
• Render Graphs
• Optimization
• General Architecture

Hardware, Drivers and Theory

• Physically Based Rendering
• GPU Architecture and theory

Blogs, News and more

• Blogs and News
• Graphics Studies

Rendering Techniques

Terrain rendering and texturing

• [Book] [GPU Gems 2, Chapter 2.] Terrain Rendering Using GPU-Based Geometry Clipmaps
• [Paper] Level of Detail for Real-Time Volumetric Terrain Rendering
• [GDC Talk] GPU-Based Run-Time Procedural Placement in Horizon: Zero Dawn
• [GDC Talk] Adaptive Virtual Texture Rendering in Far Cry 4
• [GDC Talk] Ghost Recon Wildlands Terrain Tools and Technology
• [GDC Talk] The Terrain of Halo Wars
• [GDC Talk] Terrain Rendering in Far Cry 5
• [Slides] Terrain Rendering in Far Cry 5
• [Slides] Conservative Mesh Decimation for Collision Detection and Occlusion Culling
• [Blogpost] Terrain Rendering in Games - Basics
• [Tutorial] Rastertek Terrain Tutorial (DX11)

Volumetric rendering

• [Paper] Real-time rendering of volumetric clouds
• [Slides] Nubis: Authoring Real-Time Volumetric Cloudscapes with the Decima Engine
• [Blogpost] Rendering volumetric clouds using signed distance fields
• [Blogpost] Volumetric Rendering Part 1 (Chris' graphics blog)
• [Blogpost] Volumetric Rendering Part 2 (Chris' graphics blog)
• [Blogpost] Volumetric Clouds (Autodesk Area)

Ocean and Water Rendering

• [Paper] Tessendorf's Simulating Ocean Water
• [GDC Talk] Water Rendering in Far Cry 5
• [Slides] Ocean simulation and rendering in War Thunder
• [Video] Ocean waves simulation with Fast Fourier transform (Unity, theory based)

Raytracing

• [Book] Raytracing in one Weekend
• [Book] Raytracing Gems
• [Book] Raytracing Gems II
• [Paper] Improved Shader and Texture Level of Detail Using Ray Cones
• [Paper] Fast Radius Search Exploiting Ray Tracing Frameworks
• [GDC Talk] The Latest Graphics Technology in Remedy's Northlight Engine
• [Course] Rendering Course Videos (TU Wien, Károly Zsolnai-Fehér)
• [Tutorial] NVIDIA Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorial

Reflections

• [GDC Talk] It Just Works: Ray-Traced Reflections in Battlefield V

Voxels

• [Paper] A Ray-Box Intersection Algorithm and Efficient Dynamic Voxel Rendering
• [Blogpost] Meshing in a Minecraft Game (Part 1)

Global Illumination

• [Paper] Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination with Ray-Traced Irradiance Fields
• [Blogpost] Voxel-based Global Illumination (Wicked Engine)

Vegetation Rendering

• [GDC Talk] Between Tech and Art: The Vegetation of Horizon Zero Dawn

Atmosphere Rendering

• [Paper] A Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique (Epic Games)
• [Gist] Atmosphere / Cloud Rendering resources (Reinsteam)

Animation

• [Paper] Robust Motion In-betweening (Ubisoft)
• [Video] Thin Matrix' OpenGL Animation Playlist (Java)

Post Processing

• [Blogpost] God Rays? What’s that?

Text Rendering

• [Paper] Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects (Valve)
• [Paper] Shape Decomposition for Multi-channel Distance Fields
• [Blogpost] Text Rendering Hates You
• [Git Wiki] LibGDX' Distance field fonts

Order-Independent Transparency

• [Paper] Weighted Blended Order-Independent Transparency
• [Blogpost] New weight function for Weighted-Blended Order Independent Transparency
• [Blogpost] Weighted Blender Order-Independent Transparency on iOS/OpenGL ES 3.0

Shadow Mapping

• [Book] [GPU Gems 3, Chapter 8.] Summed-Area Variance Shadow Maps
• [Book] [GPU Gems 3, Chapter 10.] Parallel-Split Shadow Maps on Programmable GPUs
• [Paper] Exponential Shadow Maps
• [Paper] Variance Shadow Maps
• [Paper] Rendering Antialiased Shadows using Warped Variance Shadow Maps
• [Paper] Light Space Perspective Shadow Maps
• [Paper] Cascaded Shadow Maps
• [Paper] Trapezoidal Shadow Maps
• [Slides] Lighting Research at Bungie
• [Blog Post] Cascaded Shadow Maps
• [Blog Post] Exponential variance shadow maps
• [Blog Post] Variance Shadow Maps

Anti Aliasing

• [Blog Post] Implementing FXAA

APIs

Vulkan

General Tutorials

• [Site] VkGuide
• [Site] GPUopen' Understanding Vulkan Objects
• [Site] API without Secrets: Introduction to Vulkan
• [Site] Vulkan-Tutorial
• [Site] Mike Bailey's Vulkan Page
• [Site] A simple triangle
• [Video Playlist] Arseny's Niagara Stream Playlist
• [Video Playlist] Brendan Galea's Vulkan Game Engine Tutorial

Synchronization

• [Github Wiki] KhronosGroup Synchronization Examples
• [Blog Post] Yet another blog explaining Vulkan synchronization
• [Blog Post] Vulkan Timeline Semaphores

Memory

• [Blog Post] Vulkan Memory Types on PC and how to use them
• [Blog Post] Nvidia's Vulkan Memory Management
• [Blog Post] A Simple Device Memory Allocator For Vulkan

Resource Management

• [Blog Post] Vulkan Shader Resource Binding

Descriptors

• [Blog Post] Vulkan Shader Resource Binding
• [Blog Post] Bindless Descriptors
• [Blog Post] Moving The Machinery to Bindless
• [Gist] Vulkan Descriptor Indexing
• [Gist] Descriptor Explanation

Compute

• [Blog Post] Vulkan Subgroup Tutorial

Code Samples

• [Github Repository] KhronosGroup Vulkan Samples
• [Github Repository] Sascha Willems Vulkan Samples

Specification

• [Site] 1.2 chunked with all extensions
• [Site] 1.2 core only

OpenGL

General Tutorials

• [Site] LearnOpenGL
• [Site] OGLdev
• [Site] OpenGL-tutorial
• [Gist] OpenGL Black Bible
• [Video Playlist] Thin Matrix' OpenGL 3D Game Tutorial Series (Java)

Code Samples

• [Github Repository] McNopper Samples

DirectX 12

General Tutorials

• [Site] Rastertek DirectX 12 Tutorial

DirectX 11

General Tutorials

• [Site] Rastertek DirectX 11 Tutorial
• [Site] Tutorialspoint DirectX Tutorial
• [Video Playlist] ChilliTomatoNoodle's DX11 3D-Programming Series
• [Video Playlist] Jpres DirectX11 Engine Tutorials

DirectX 10

General Tutorials

• [Site] Rastertek DirectX 10 Tutorial

Engine Development and General Techniques

General Techniques

• [Slides] Rendering the Hellscape of DOOM Eternal
• [Blogpost] Graphics API abstraction

Render Graphs

• [Blogpost] Organizing GPU Work with Directed Acyclic Graphs
• [Blogpost] Render Graph (Simon's Tech Blog)
• [Blogpost] Render graphs and Vulkan — a deep dive
• [Blogpost] Render Graph Optimization Scribbles
• [Slides] FrameGraph: Extensible Rendering Architecture in Frostbite

Optimization

• [Paper] Forward+: Bringing Deferred Lighting to the Next Level
• [GDC Talk] Marvel's Spider-Man: A Technical Postmortem
• [GDC Talk] Optimizing the Graphics Pipeline With Compute
• [Slides] Optimizing the Graphics Pipeline With Compute
• [Blogpost] GPU Memory Aliasing
• [Blogpost] Unity GPU culling experiments (part 1) (MPC)
• [Blogpost] Experiments in GPU-Based occlusion culling (Interplay of Light)
• [Blogpost] A Primer On Efficient Rendering Algorithms & Clustered Shading.
• [Blogpost] (NVIDIA) The Peak-Performance-Percentage Analysis Method for Optimizing Any GPU Workload
• [Github Gist] silvesthu's Gist on GPU Optimization for GameDev
• [Tutorial] Frustum Culling in OpenGL

General Architecture

• [Lecture] System Architectures
• [Blogpost] Halycon Architecture

Hardware, Drivers and Theory

Physically Based Rendering

• [Book] Physically Based Rendering:From Theory To Implementation

GPU architecture and theory

• [Blog Post] Breaking down Barriers
• [Blog Post] Making Reading from VRAM less Catastrophic

Other

• [Blog Post] Why are video games graphics (still) a challenge? Productionizing rendering algorithms

Blogs and News

• JendrikIllner, Graphics Programming Weekly
• 3Dgep
• Maister's Graphics Adventures
• GPUopen
• Nvidia Developer

Graphics Studies

• Graphics Studies Compilation