Catalin Zima - XNA and HLSL blog

Fake Rim Lighting, for use in cute games (inspired by Super Mario Galaxy screenshots)

Fur

For this month’s sample, I worked hard to try and render some heightmap terrain on Zune, using voxel rendering, but wasn’t very successful.

Voxel technology was used to render terrains in some older games, like Delta Force, Commanche series, and the game that did the best job ever with voxels (and one of my top 3 games of all time), Outcast.

Some pictures of the sample:

• Running on the Zune, at 320*240

• Running on the PC, upscaled to 640 * 480

You can find the sample and source code here.

This semester at the university, we had a Graphics Processing Systems class. While old fixed-function OpenGl was used in courses and laboratory works, for the project, I chose to use my favorite graphics API in the whole world. Yup, you know what I’m talking about… the XNA Framework.

A few of my friends also got dragged into XNA, based on my two years of talking about how cool it is. Neither of them had any previous XNA experience, so I guided them to some tutorials and the creator’s club site and let them experience it from there. Also, popular request from them sparked the idea of an easy to use shadows library.

Godswood

From all the projects I’ve seen made, the one that I am most proud of is that of my beloved iubi-pufi-honey-bunny (read fiancee), Lidia. She made a great tree model inspired by George R. R. Martin’s works, all from scratch, and placed some mountains and water around it. After adding some falling snow, she decided to make the snow accumulate on the ground and trees, and came up with the idea to do some simple shader tricks and blend in the snow texture based on the time passed since the snow began to fall. The result looks very nice. Check it out for yourself, by downloading the binaries. (control the camera with directional keys and mouse, use [S] to toggle snow)

Island in the Ocean

For my project, I decided to try and implement Atmospheric Scattering and realistic water rendering. For atmospheric scattering, I learned from Javier Canton Ferrero’s sample. For realistic water rendering, I read, studied and converted to XNA Yuri Kryachko’s article from GPU Gems 2, “Using Vertex Texture Displacement for Realistic Water Rendering”. My palm trees were modeled by Lidia.

You can see the results below, and download the binaries here.

Use the gamepad, or keyboard+mouse for camera control. [Space] pauses the simulation, and [S] speeds it up.

I’m releasing a small library for shadow mapping in XNA. This is the beginning of a library that will allow using shadow maps in XNA without writing a new shader, or setting up your models. Just using some calls to a library class.

I also included a small example of using the library with 1 object. The main class of the library is ShadowMapRenderer, and it implements PCF shadow mapping, with screen-space bluring.

Remember, this is a very early version, I will probably change the API very much until a real beta version. I just thought I’d put it out to help people who want to have quick shadows in their 3D games.

You can download it here: ShadowMapRenderer

Have Fun!

Yes it can

My may sample is also my first public sample written in XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP, and it shows how to restore the depth buffer from a depth texture.

This way, models drawn to a render target, with post processing applied to them can intersect and obscure normal models, drawn after all the post processing is done.

For more details, jump to the sample’s page: Restoring the Depth Buffer, where you can find a short explanation on how the sample works.

To dive right into the code, download it here. Please note that the sample is written in XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP, but the technique also works just fine in 2.0.

Clicky! and Clicky!

(These are valid links to XNA awesomeness)

I finally finished the April sample. I know it’s May already but the MVP Summit and the Easter Holiday took most of this month

So for April we have Dynamic 2D Shadows. Check it out in the Samples section, and let me know what you think. Or download it directly, here.

I hope you will enjoy this sample.

Ok, so it’s been a week since I’ve been back, but with all the school catching up I needed to do, I only now got time to write this. If I could only use one word to describe my trip, I’d use the word awesome.

After a long flight, with a one night delay in New York, I finally arrived at the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

After a short ride on the bus I was downtown Seattle, and really excited about what I saw. I walked around the city and went sightseeing for the rest of the day, where I saw the Space Needle, the Pike Place market, the original Starbucks, and other places.

Monday morning, I went to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, registered for the summit, and then quickly went to check-in at the Renaissance Hotel. Back from the hotel, we were served lunch, and then Toby Richards, Colleen Hunter-Gale and Sean O’Driscoll gave us a few words. After these talks, we got a chance to meet up with our regional MVPs and our MVP leads during a reception and (a very tasty) dinner. Here I got to meet my MVP Lead, Petru Juchovschi, and other Romanian MVPs.

After desert, I went over to the U.S. area, and sat down with my fellow XNA/DirectX MVPs and had a great time. I finally got to see Nick, George, Andy and Michael in person, together with a few other DirectX MVPs, and their MVP Lead, Eric Sassaman.

When the night was done, I went back to my hotel room, and slept until morning.

Tuesday morning we started off towards the Microsoft campus. I must say I was very excited to see it, and really liked how the campus looked.

I looked around a little at the Microsoft Conference Center and then took a bus to Building 85, which is a sort of a cooler version of Area 51. Some people can go in, extremely interesting things go on inside there, but you can’t talk about them once outside. This is where we met Dave Weller and the XNA team, and here we had some awesome discussions. In the evening, we went to Jillian’s with the XNA team and had fun talking to them over a drink.

Wednesday we had even more discussions, which were followed in the evening by the Attendee Party at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. After a walk through the museums, I met up with the other XNA MVPs. We got to eat, drink, talk,  listen to people doing karaoke with a live band, and then finally watch, boo and cheer Jim and Ziggy as they showed they expertise in the skills of Rock Band.

The last day, Thursday, we got keynotes from Ray Ozzie, the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft and Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer.

After the closing remarks by Toby, we (the XNA MVPs) got together for a last lunch.

For the rest of the day, I went to do some final shopping and visit the Underground Tour of Seattle. Early Friday morning, I got on the plane and started my journey back home, impatiently waiting to get back to my beloved Lidia.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the summit. I met some great people there, and got to learn and do some very interesting stuff. The XNA Team members are really awesome people, I was impressed about how they talked with us, how openly they discussed, and how interested they were in out feedback. I’ll take this opportunity to thank them again for their great work. The other MVPs are also a cool bunch of people, and I can’t wait to see them again… maybe next year.

What do the following people have in common?

• The Zman (Andy Dunn)
• Ziggy (Michael Morton)
• Nick Gravelyn
• Machaira (Jim Perry)
• George Clingerman
• Mykre (Glenn Wilson)
• Jon Watte
• Bill Reiss
• Riemer Grootjans

Besides their great love for XNA, and the awesome support they provide to the community through their samples, tutorials and forum posts, they are all Microsoft DirectX/XNA MVPs.

Today I am proud to announce that I’ll be joining their ranks, because Microsoft just named me a Microsoft DirectX/XNA MVP.

So what did I do to deserve this?

• I helped out as ofthen as I could on the XNA Forums
• I wrote a number of articles, tutorials and samples, including: Deferred Rendering, Vertex Textures, Pie Menu component, Fog of War, and others
• I held two presentations to inform the students at my university about the XNA Framework and XNA Game Studio Express, and draw them into out awesome community.
• Hung out on #xna on efnet

I am very thankfull of the honor Microsoft gave me; and I will continue to help out the community to the best of my abilities, and to spread the word about XNA Game Studio Express. I already have some presentations, tutorials and articles planned, about which I’ll talk when the time comes.

I would also like to take this opportunity and sincerely thank my university teacher, Assoc.Prof.Dr.Eng. Mihaela Dinsoreanu, Mr. Mihai Dinsoreanu and the iQuest company for funding my trip to the upcoming Microsoft MVP Summit 2008.

Thank you very much!

I hope my activity as an MVP will be worthy, and I’ll do my best to support the community in the future.

In the last few hours of march (the first few hours of April for me), I am finally satisfied with the lightning sample, so I can release it.

Check out the sample in the Samples section, where I have a short description.

If you’re too eager for that, you can download it directly from here, and see the four examples in action.

The controls are:

• Cycle through examples: Gamepad A / Keyboard Space
• Toggle Background: Gamepad B / Keyboard B
• Freeze Animation: Gamepad Y / Keyboard F
• Exit Sample : Gamepad Back / Keyboard Escape

Later, I’ll try to write an article about how the effect was implemented, and what each class, struct and member represents. But this will take a while, because I’m very busy with school projects, and some stuff I can’t talk about yet.

Enjoy the sample!