Improving 3D rendering quality

Posted on:November 03 2005

Most people know that the rendering quality of the Irrlicht 3D engine is very low and below the standard of other popular engines. That's because image quality was never a goal when I started developing Irrlicht. In fact, Irrlicht originally only was able to handle 16 bit data. This has been improved, but Irrlicht 3D scenes still look ugly. But in spite of this Irrlicht is one of the most popular 3D engines anyway. So, what if I improved rendering quality? The last few weeks I've played around with this, and it looks it will become a big feature of the next release.

The first pair of images shows antialiasing, this is implemented in Irrlicht since some versions. All other stuff is new. Basicly these are results of enhancements to the internal precision, better and new filters and so on. I've also uploaded a big image showing a screenshot of the current ugly version and a shot of the upcoming release, which shows the difference quite well.
No - and I don't know when the next release will be out. :)

Comments:

hey cool!
i can't wait for the next release :D

bakkdoor

Quote
2005-11-03 23:23:00

Nice one :) Your image compare bears an uncanny resemblence to this one: http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?full=1&set_albumName=album06&id=anisotropy&option=com_gallery&Itemid=55&include=view_photo.php , although back then we didn't have any FSAA to show off, that only came in later.

It's incredible how much difference aniso filtering makes on a FPS-style view (walls / floors being frequently at acute angles to your view), it's a shame it's kinda expensive.

Best of luck with the next release.

sinbad

Quote
2005-11-04 01:12:00

what exactly are the new rendering techniques niko?

Electron

Quote
2005-11-04 01:22:00

COOL! :-D

ben

Quote
2005-11-04 04:31:00

Basicly, I've rewritten Irrlichts custom mipmap generation, added anisotropic filtering and am defaulting to higher quality textures.
@sindbad: thx. I didn't know that screenshot, it is also quite funny that the version number of that ogre release there is the same as the next irrlicht version, which looks like irrlicht has a similar development path. :)

niko

Quote
2005-11-04 08:25:00

Has the projection changed also a little bit or are the two picure's not from the exactly same camera position?

joshi

Quote
2005-11-04 08:37:00

>> No - and I don't know when the next release will be out. :)

mhhh... when?! ;)

noone

Quote
2005-11-04 16:24:00

nope, simply not the same camera position.

niko

Quote
2005-11-04 20:15:00

Awesome work! :-). Can't wait for next release ;-) as always:).