Last Updated: 07 / 17 / 2002

Developer Newsletter: Issue #2

In this month's issue:

Register for The Gathering 2!

It's not too late to register for The Gathering 2, happening on June 13th and 14th at the Hilton Metropole hotel in Paddington, London!

Two days of focused technical tutorial sessions will give you the opportunity to test your software reflexes on NVIDIA's latest, greatest and future hardware and tools. We'll train you in the secrets of effective Direct3D programming, from basic to advanced techniques, and turn you into a master of Direct3D! Microsoft and NVIDIA will be presenting some of the latest technology you'll see in DirectX 9.

If you were worried that three hundred and thirty seven pounds (plus VAT) seemed like a lot, then keep in mind that the conference cost also includes a free GeForce4 Ti graphics card!

Shadow Mapping Demo from Team nVDemo

Team nVDemo at the Milwaukee School of Engineering recently completed a shadow mapping demo. This demo provides an excellent overview of shadow mapping, including extensive documentation and code.

The overall project web site is here.

The final demo, source code, and documentation is here.

NVMeshMender

NVMeshMender is a tool that helps condition meshes for per-pixel lighting. The following is the list of NVMeshMender's features:

generates tangent space for bump mapping & per-pixel lighting
generates smooth tangent space information
fixes common tangent space problems via vertex duplication, including mirroring & excessive stretching
optional cylindrical texture coordinate generation
optional texgen texture matrix
optional normal calculation, weighted by face size, or equal weighting

NVMeshMender is available here.

Demos from Carsten Wenzel

Carsten Wenzel sent us a number of very exciting effects, which you can find here. The effects include:

- Beams (bright rays emanating from a sun-like object)
- Hair (spinning, shimmering hair strands)
- Infinite Zoom (a journey through the Mandelbrot set)
- Ocean Scene (beautiful and relaxing water waves)
- Soft Objects (interactions between bubbles)
- Volumetric Lighting (volumetrically illuminated letters)

You can also visit Carsten's Web page.

Photoshop Plugin Updates

Version 3.43 of the Photoshop Texture Compression Plugin is now available here!

In case you didn't know, the plugin contains the following:

Adobe PhotoShop DXT Compression Plugin.

Reads and writes .dds files compressed or uncompressed.

Adobe PhotoShop Normal Map Plugin.

Creates normal maps from height maps for per pixel rendering.

Command Line Compression Tools

Command line based tools to compress/decompress images

nvDXTLib.lib

Compression library for using compression in your tools, with examples

Coding Tip

When using NV_occlusion_query, don't request the results immediately after making the query. You must structure your application code to hide the latency of the query.

Here's how you could do this:

initialize the depth buffer with objects that were not fully occluded in the previous frame
do occlusion queries on these objects
try to sort this rendering to get the best occlusion information
mask depth buffer writes and draw objects that were fully occluded in the previous frame
do occlusion queries on these objects
do color rendering (shading, shadows, whatever) for all objects that were not fully occluded in the previous frame

This approach allows you to hide the latency of the query over a frame, but it means that sometimes you don't draw the first frame for an object that becomes visible. More advanced approaches can be used to eliminate this problem, but they are beyond the scope of this tip.