We will be at Game Connection Europe this year!

Surprise, surprise! We will be presenting a sponsored session for SauRay^TM at Game Connection Europe this year:

Our session is on Friday, November the 4th at 11AM hosted at the Paris Expo. This will be the first in a series of talks that I'm planning to give on SauRay^TM in the coming months. If I've never showcased it to you, here's your chance to see it demo'd live! Hope to see you there.

Cheers,
Baktash

SauRay^TM's in the news! (and other news!)

I actually wanted to make this announcement on our schedule, but got beaten to it by eXputer:

I can't say I'm happy with the picture they paint of TooMuchVoltage Software -- i.e. without credibility, obscure -- but at least they covered HighOmega v3.0's release and our DAIS approach favorably which is heartwarming.

Since then, I've went public with the technical document behind SauRay^TM's patent.

There are also new SauRay^TM-guarded CS:GO/TF2 servers hosted on the west coast:

CS:GO: steam://connect/35.92.203.254:27015
TF2: steam://connect/35.92.203.254:27020

Keep an eye on it as updates will find their way on there sooner rather than later. These are fairly exciting times with more exciting news to come. Inviting you to stick with us for the ride!

Cordially,
Baktash

An innovation while pushing boundaries in content delivery

So while I was working on pushing more and more content on older hardware (nVidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti), I ended up with a technique that makes visibility buffer/deferred material rendering faster for rendering engines that use visibility buffers/material rendering without a DAIS buffer. One notable example is rendering of Nanite geometry in Unreal Engine 5.

Check it out in the graphics programming weekly!

UPDATE: turns out I independently rederived Burns and Hunt's original approach with some notable differences:

• I do ray-picking on the near plane while they inverse project fragments to get ray directions.
• I also have no need for transforming geometry since all my geometry is post-transform from compute while they still have to transform oriented instances.

Cheers,
Baktash

C.L.A.S.H is still kicking...

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. But I've managed to keep things going for now :)

After many months of engine upgrades to support asset streaming and processing via multi-threaded rendering (along with some situational setbacks), I finally have some more updates!

Feast your eyes on a scene of 7.6M triangles, path-traced in post-process using SDF shallow binary LBVHs. The skybox alone is 1M triangles.

Probably the least opportune time for post-apocalyptic scenery, but finally got some free time after a few busy months.

There are 7.6M tris in this scene (+1M for the skybox). #SDF #BVH #pathtracing with #irradiance caching for diffuse on a 1050Ti at 240p (upsampled to 1080p). pic.twitter.com/YuRrNiliFh

— TooMuchVoltage Software (@TooMuchVoltage) March 7, 2022

The above thread has a link to a rough benchmark and relevant technical details for the curious.

Here's to hoping the world calms down soon.

Cheers,
Baktash

Announcing C.L.A.S.H: Colonial Life-Advancing Self-sustained Hemisphere

After a literal decade in the making, it is finally here:

Yes it will be running on HighOmega v3.0 (3.021 as of this moment).

Yes it will be path-traced and de-noised. And yes, raytracing will be supported on Radeon VII and the RX 5700 XT.

I cannot put in words the amount of relief I feel from putting this out in the wild as I've had other ventures take up a good chunk of my time recently.

I hope you like this production as much as I've been dreaming of and longing for it for the last ten (10) long years.

Featuring artwork from the wonderful and talented Vittorio Garofoli and Florian Feldbinder.

Follow and hit me up on Twitter if you have any more questions as I will probably be most available there. Also check it out on Reddit... if that's your thing.

Wishing you times as happy as these are for me,
Baktash

NV to KHR ray tracing migration

Firstly, happy new year if I haven't told you this personally! :).

If you do ray tracing in Vulkan you might find this write up of mine of immense help :). This will help you move to cross vendor Vulkan raytracing in case your code (still) needs nVidia hardware. It was also featured in the Graphics Programming Weekly - Issue 166 :).

Cheers,
Baktash

Come check out our i3D 2020 presentation!

You probably don't want to miss this.
I will do live tweaks and source review for this exclusive live demonstration! Don't forget to register here. (it's free this year!)

Cheers,
Baktash

HighOmega v3.02 is here!

UPDATED: June 18th, 2020

 

I encourage you to try it out by getting it from GitHub and leaving your feedback on reddit. This will be the last release of this demo before an upcoming game. (fingers crossed!)
Your feedback is of utmost importance and will be implemented if it is crucial and within reach.

Cheers,
Baktash

Mesh booleans seem pretty popular these days!

UPDATED: March 12th, 2020

And we're back in the graphics programming weekly! :)

What a way to start posting for the new year!
Click here so you don't miss all the fun. It contains the secret ingredient! ;)

Here's how it looks in-engine (... the reddit post has better quality video though):

 

Cheers,
Baktash

Shadertoy experiments!

So it's been quiet here for a while. And that's because I've been taking a break making Shadertoys :).
Already four of them have been featured in Technically Art which makes me very proud!
Check them out here!

 
Here's a preview for those of you without a decent card:

 

Cheers,
Baktash

We're in the Graphics Programming Weekly! Woohoo!

 

Grab your issue right here! :)

 

Wanna know why everything is so special this time? Check this video out :)

 

Woohoo!
Baktash

Announcing HighOmega v3.0: King Mackerel. No RTX? No problem :)

UPDATED: June 28th, 2019

 

Firstly, welcome to our new website! Feel free to look around. Hope you like what you see.

Secondly we just recently released HighOmega's most recent iteration: v3.0 code-named King Mackerel. This release's rendering pipeline mainly relies on denoising path-traced images produced by either RTX or our very own Voxel-based hybrid path-tracing technique described here. This means that having an RTX capable card is not necessary for getting denoised path-traced graphics.

Please note that not everything in the demo is path traced: distant geometry, the sky, transmittive surfaces and light shafts use traditional means of rendering. The aurora borealis is built on a special kind of noise called Triangular Noise developed by Nimitz.

More details can be found here or here.

 

If you liked the demo don't hesitate to get in touch.

Until next time,
Baktash

(Aurora features Triangular noise
by Nimitz!)