Game Engines Blog 3

For the past couple of weeks we have been learning about several things related to graphics. Some of the topics I had already learned/knew about such as deferred rendering and motion blur but I did learn about some new things. One of the new things I learned was stencil buffers. Simply put, the stencil buffer is used to limit the area of rendering.The stencil buffer can be useful in many situations such as improving shadows and reflections. I plan on looking into stencil buffers but probably not during this semester. 

I upgraded my water shaders this past week. I added vertex displacement based samples from a height map.

Now all thats missing is some cool lighting and some reflections. I plan on working on that next week to get homework out of the way. I started looking into fresnel reections and I think it shouldn't be too difficult.

In terms of GDW, development has slowed down due to the approaching deadline of the homework questions. But after the MIGS trip next week, game development should continue 100%. I'm currently working on getting first-person camera controls working and after that I'll start working on some fluid character movement.