History: SoC2012 Implementation of Off-Screen Particles

Project covers implementation of "GPU gems 3. Chapter 23. High-Speed, Off-Screen Particles" from:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch23.html .

It is being realised during "Google Summer of Code 2012".

Student assigned to the project: Karol Badowski.
Promotor of the project: Assaf Raman.

Project repository is a fork of OGRE mercurial repository (revision 8d3b960cce3e), aviable at:
https://bitbucket.org/KarolBadowski/ogre-gsoc2012-offscreenparticles .

Project discussion thread on official OGRE forum:
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=69771 .

Milestones:

1. preparation before implementation:

2. depth acquisition:

3. downsampled rendering:

4. render target merging & shaders:

5. mixed resolution rendering:

Tasks for each milestone:

1:
- requirements specification
- UML diagrams
- reading tutorials
- understanding documentation

2:
- two pass depth acquisition
- multi render target depth acquisition
- z-buffer depth acquisition
- alpha channel depth acquisition
- automatisation of depth acquisition technique choice

3:
- dowsampling with variable scale
- point sampling depth renderer
- maximum of depth samples renderer

4:
- alpha-blending
- binary depth test
- soft particles

5:
- edges detection
- stenciling