Custom Material Pipeline

Timeline: 2 months

Description: A pipeline for quick iteration on materials packaged with a set of bespoke PBR shaders, demonstrated in a 3d model preview application.

Context

An existing custom game engine I wrote contained an forward renderer with services to pass textures, shaders, and game data down to the GPU. In this project, I created a material pipeline with the following goals:

• Associate texture maps, shaders, and game data together (a “Material). Data-drive definitions in XML.

• Manage the construction, caching and destruction of render resources automatically

• Provide an optional default method for passing lighting, camera, and game data

To test this pipeline, I created a .obj model viewer and set of basic Blinn-Phong and Physically Based Rendering (P.B.R.) materials.

A stylized fur material (right) is shown alongside is xml-driven definition (left).

The Material Pipeline

Each material in my Engine binds a set of texture maps, game constants and shaders together. The material class handles configuration of the DirectX11 pipeline as is necessary while removing redundant calls to pipeline setup. Additionally, game constants are passed down based on the frequencies which game data is likely to change.

Reusable Shaders

I explored a variety of rendering topics while implementing this material pipeline. Below is a list of some of the features I added to my engine:

• Cube mapped Environment Reflections

  • Materials can opt in to expect an environment cubemap. By default, these are used for reflections.

• Physically Based Material Shader

  • A material that supports roughness, metalness, ambient occlusion, and emission maps, in addition to the albedo, normal, and specular maps mentioned above.

• Hardware Tesselation

  • DirectX11 materials with a displacement map have a configurable property to use hardware tessellation to increase mesh detail.

A test from mid-development of a material using environment reflections.