Clustered Forward Rendering Progress

Entry posted by Josh · June 25, 2018

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In order to get the camera frustum space dividing up correctly, I first implemented a tiled forward renderer, which just divides the screen up into a 2D grid. After working out the math with this, I was then able to add the third dimension and make an actual volumetric data structure to hold the lighting information. It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally got it working.

This screenshot shows the way the camera frustum is divided up into a cubic grid of 16x16x16 cells. Red and green show the XY position, while the blue component displays the depth:

And here you can see the depth by itself, enhanced for visibility:

I also added dithering to help hide light banding that can appear in gradients. Click on the image below to view it properly:

I still have some bugs to resolve, but the technique basically works. I have no complete performance benchmarks yet to share but I think this approach is a lot faster than deferred rendering. It also allows much more flexible lighting, so it will work well with the advanced lighting system I have planned.

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