CarolRenderer

Build:

1. Enabel graphics tools in windows settings for debug layer
2. Download DirectX Shader Compiler and compile the shaders

  $env:PATH+=";/path/to/the/dxc.exe"
  cd carol_renderer/shader
  powershell -executionpolicy bypass -file compile_debug.ps1

3. Update submodule and build with cmake

  git submodule init
  git submodule update
  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake ..
  cmake --build .

4. Run

  cd build/bin
  ./carol-engine.exe

Rendering Pipeline

Samples

Features:

• Model viewer

  • Model loader based on Assimp
    • Currently alpha blending will be closed as methods for identifying automatically whether a mesh needs to be alpha blended have not been found.
    • It's not guaranteed that Assimp will correctly load the skinned animations.
  • Texture loader based on DirectXTex
    • Texture usage follows glTF 2.0 standard.
    • You need to offer the path of the folder which stores the textures.
    • It's not guaranteed that Assimp will correctly load the texture path.

• Physically Based Shading

  • These are default and the only supported PBR settings now. GUI for PBR settings is under development.
    • Subsurface Scattering BRDF: Lambertian BRDF
    • Specular BRDF:
      • Normal Distribution Function: GGX Normal Distribution Function
      • Geometry Function: Height-Correlated Masking-Shadowing Function

• Deferred Shading

  • Store diffuse color, emission, roughness, metalness and normal in G-Buffer

• Amplification shader and mesh shader

  • These are features supported by GPU with Turing or more advanced architectures.

• Shader model 6.6

  • HLSL Dynamic resources feature is used to simplify the root signature.

• Viedo memory management

  • Implemented via buddy system and segregated free lists

• GPU-driven culling

  • Instance culling is implemented via compute shader
  • Meshlet culling is implemented via amplification shader
  • Supported culling:
    • Frustum culling (instance and meshlet)
    • Normal cone backface culling (meshlet)
    • Hi-Z occlusion culling (instance and meshlet)

• Cascaded Shadow Map

  • With split level specified to 5 in default

• Screen-Space Ambient-Occlusion

  • Implemented via compute shader with 3 times edge-preserving filtering in default

• Tone Mapping

  • Clamp
  • Reinhard
  • ACES

• Temporal Anti-Aliasing

  • Impleted vai compute shader
  • Jitter the sample position via Halton low-discrepancy sequence (from Unreal Engine 4)
  • Blend current and history pixel colors in YCoCg space (from Unreal Engine 4)
  • Clip the history pixel color via the bounding-box constructed by the expectation and variance of colors of the sampled neighboring pixel (from NVIDIA)

• OIT

  • Implemented via per-pixel linked-list and compute shader