Project Update 1

The first step to this project is getting the software rasterizer working inside a hardware-based renderer. The software rasterizer needs to be used during the visibility calculations inside the hardware renderer. Luckily for us, the design of Ogre's scene managers already has a useful place for doing this.

We start by grabbing Ogre's existing OctreeSceneManager. We are going to use this octree implementation to our advantage. During the visibility calculations we render visible occluders to our small depth buffer. Once we are creating a decent depth buffer, we know the software rasterization process is working. Indeed, we can paste a small window in the upper corner to see this depth buffer in real time. That's what I've done in the screenshot below.

This is Ogre's standard Fresnel demo. You can see the depth buffer I've generated in the upper-right. Notice the white in the image. That is because I've only made the outer walls of the courtyard occluders. The other parts of scene aren't, and so they don't get rendered and you see the background, maximum depth value show up as white.

I will probably be using this demo as the basis for my testing this quarter. Eventually I want to use more complicated indoor levels such as the freely available Quake 3 maps online.