Voxel cloud raymarcher based on Nubis
For BUAS Y2 block B, I did a research project.
For this project I chose to create a volumetric renderer, since I was very interested in
how they work and their pretty results.
For this project I did a lot of research into different techniques, and ended up writing
a technical article that explains the specifics.
I researched multiple sources and techniques for this project.
I ended up mostly following the voxel technique in Nubis^3
since that aligned most with what I wanted, I explained more about my choices in my article
This allowed me to give a lot of artistic control to the clouds
Rendering clouds is quite expensive so performance was a big concern while making this
project
During the project I ran scalability tests and profiled using multiple tools like Pix
and NSight
I implemented multiple high and lower level optimisations including:
- Adaptive sampling based on distance fields
- Caching of lighting data
- Block Compression
- Temporal, i.e. Reprojection, Jittering
Here is a document detailing
some of my optimisations
Video showing runtime performance
Running on a RTX 4060 Laptop
GPU at 1080p
Volumetric pass is under
"Volumarcher: ..."
Since I planned on porting this to next block's custom engine team project Usability was
a important factor.
For this I made the API simple to use, mainly having to supply settings and existing
scene targets.
I also communicated with artists to make sure it would be usable for them to make
clouds,
From this I created a houdini asset to generate VDB files to be rendered.
Article
Source