Geomerics
20 Mar 2012, 18:25 UTC
My first contract as Reanimator Ltd was with Geomerics, a Cambridge-based company run by Chris Doran with a team run by Jules Davis. Geomerics makes a product, Enlighten, which is a global-illumination solution for real-time games.
The first thing I did was ported their rendering engine (a very simple "just draw everything" affair) to PS3. We only had 2 months so I elected to write a Direct3D-compatible layer for the PS3 (on top of libgcm). I got enough of this working within 5 weeks than we had spare time in which I ported their core runtime to SPU. We ended up with a pretty cool demo!
I went back to Geomerics and finished "IndirectX" as we called it, adding proper synchronization (Lock/Unlock) and all other base DX9 features (not all of D3DX, and none of fixed function).
Other highlights of working here:
- Did a software rasterizer based on clipping, so each pixel received the triangle, clipped to the pixel - i.e. precise geometric coverage information. This was useful for a bunch of things e.g. texture atlassing and offline image generation.
- Wrote a kd-tree builder & raytracer for precomputed AO and other GI-related precomputes.