Friday, 19 September 2008

Young 3D engines suffer acne

As the engine grows up, I refactor some routine. Cleaner code allows me to use some higher level function, like a 3Ds objects loader. And here appears a well-know issue: z-fighting.

Even on a surface closest to the light source, you will always discover minor differences in the values associated with the R texture coordinate(...). This can result in "surface acne"(...). You can mitigate this problem by applying a depth offset when rendering in the shadow map:

...
glEnable (GL_POLYGON_OFFSET_FILL);
glPolygonOffset (factor, 0.0f);
...

(...)A balance need to be struck when it comes to polygon offset usage.

from OpenGL superbible 4th edition by Richard Wright (Wesley).
That balance is not so easy to achieve; as Nvidia says in its papers, it's really matter of art.

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