Serenity Engine:

The Serenity Engine is the result of the work I developed for my master thesis. The engine approximates global illumination in real-time through a combination of local and global illumination techniques.

Conventional local illumination techniques are used to simulate direct lighting. Namely, sun light is simulated using the phong illumination model combined with Cascaded Shadow Mapping and Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows to provide reallistic shadows.

Smooth global illumination is achieved using a techhnique that I developed to simulate sky lighting called Sky Lighting Irradiance Volume, along with an implementation of the Cascaded Light Propagation Volumes.

These effects are then complemented with reallistic reflections and refractions generated by a real-time ray tracer that splits the rendering between the CPU and the GPU to take advantage of their particular computing benefits.

In the Games & Demos section you can find a demo that I created to show the capabilities of the engine. And if you want to know about how it works, you can download my master thesis from the following links:

Article (reduced version)

Master Thesis

Features:

Illumination Foundations: Deferred Rendering High Dynamic Range Rendering Linear Space Lighting
Real-Time Atmospheric Scattering: Calculation of sky color Accurate variation of sun light color throughout day time Aerial perspective effect
Direct Illumination: Phong Illumination Model Cascaded Shadow Mapping with Stabilization Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows
Indirect Diffuse Illumination: Cascaded Light Propagation Volumes Sky Lighting Irradiance Volume Sky light injection and propagation into Light Propagation Volumes Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
Ray Traced Illumination: Fully integrated real-time ray tracer that generates reallistic reflections and refractions Deferred rendering used to centralize all lighting on the GPU Rendering carefuly scheduled to allow the CPU and the GPU to work in parallel

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