Real-time Snow Deformation

Terrain rendering using Compute Shaders

I have proposed a scalable real-time snow deformation technique implemented on the GPU using compute shaders and hardware tessellation. It is based on the approach used in Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds. The method was extended using snow elevation along the edges of the deformation.

The algorithm renders the snow-affecting objects using an orthographic frustum centered on the player from below into a depth buffer. The rendered depth is then used to determine if the deformation has to be applied. The deformation heightmap is accumulated in a persistent ping-pong buffer. The algorithm remaps the heightmap using a cubic function and filters the height using a separable Gaussian blur filter. The required texels are fetched into LDS using gather instructions, which gets the four texels that would be used for hardware bilinear interpolation. Finally, the normals are computed using the finite difference method based on the deformation heightmap.

The technique has a sliding window that moves the deformation heightmap with the player anywhere in the world, which allows this technique to be used in a massive open-world game.

2D Pixel Platformer

Programming in Unity Engine

It is time to dive into a dangerous world in a forgotten dimension. You are armed with a sword, bow, and gamepad. Can you survive? This game is inspired by Heart of Darkness (PS1), created by Amazing Studios. I worked on the game with my colleague Klára. My focus was mainly on artificial intelligence and graph algorithms to create challenging enemies that pushed the game to a whole new level. I also drew enemy animations and the environment that was used to create the levels.

Rendering of Biomolecular Datasets

Real-time Visualization

It was a university project focused on real-time visualization of biomolecular datasets with the use of deferred shading and outline rendering. I implemented a variant of Metaball rendering technique that filters the normals of the cell. The filtered result is then used for lighting calculations. Finally, the cell membrane is rendered using a semi-transparent pass with Fresnel effect. I created the application using C++ and OpenGL.

Photogrammetry Pipeline

Creating materials and assets for games

During my studies at Czech Technical University in Prague, teams from Center for Machine Perception implemented state-of-the-art algorithms used for reconstruction of 3D objects from images. The method is based on comparing multiple images taken from different positions to estimate object coordinates in 3D space. These techniques were also used in games such as Far Cry 5 and Star Wars: Battlefront to create realistic environments.

Based on their results and my experiments, I described a photogrammetry pipeline for creating game-ready PBR assets. It consists of multiple steps focusing on cleaning the data, efficient parameterization with proper UV density, and optimization. Below, you will find a sample of results that I achieved.

AK-47

Game ready PBR asset

One can define a function that will describe reflectance properties of a surface, but it is not always about programming. I also used to be a technical artist in my spare time to understand how the art department works. One of my created assets is AK-47 with a physically based material. I used 3ds Max for low-poly modeling, high-poly modeling, and 2D parameterization. Textures were made using Photoshop and Substance Painter.