Progress Report ~2

Another update! And so soon after the last one.

Met with Matt today, to update him on my progress and discuss what I'll be focusing on next.

There are two aspects to my research question - optimisation and global illumination. For the next fortnight I will be focusing on optimising the SSAO shader, since currently it's hitting my framerate quite substantially. Then I will focus on the global illumination aspect.

I left room for manouvering in my Gantt chart, so I should be okay for time - getting a cold and then the flu didn't help, but I'm confident that I can get everything/or most things that I planned to do, done.

Tasks for the next two weeks:

• Implement blur shader - test both Gaussian (using scene normals) and bilateral blurs
• Try and get rid of SSAO artifacts (as seen in previous post)
• Optimisation - using scene normals in SSAO calculation
• Optimisation - try out different occlusion functions
• Optimisation - investigate reducing texture lookups
• Optimisation -investigate other techniques that improve performance

I'm also going to start writing the literature review, this week and next week and I've made a list of possible topics to include:

• Background on Ambient Occlusion, and non screen space techniques
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - Crytek's method, and variations on it. e.g. Nvidia's Image Space Horizon Based AO, and Blizzard's implementation of SSAO in Starcraft 2.  
• Screen Space Directional Occlusion - from the paper "Approximating Dynamic Global Illumination in Image Space"
• Screen Space Radiosity - from an article in Shaderx7 - it's a very small section of the article but I'm trying to find more on it. 

I will also write up my draft introduction this week.