My Run-in with Borislav Iliev’s Stuff
Okay, so I gotta share what I was messing around with recently. The name Borislav Iliev kept popping up in some graphics programming forums I lurk in. People were talking about some neat rendering tricks he apparently figured out or shared.
I got curious, you know? Saw some screenshots, looked pretty slick. Some kind of fast atmospheric scattering or something along those lines. Looked way better than the basic stuff I usually cobble together. So, I thought, “Alright, let’s give this a shot. How hard can it be?” Famous last words, right?
First step, I started digging around. Finding concrete code examples directly from him wasn’t straightforward. Lots of discussion, fragmented bits, papers maybe, but not like a simple tutorial. I spent a good evening just trying to piece together the core idea from different sources.
Then I actually tried coding it. Fired up my usual setup. Let me tell you, the math involved… woof. Some parts clicked, others felt like reading ancient hieroglyphs. I’d translate a chunk of pseudocode or equations into actual code, hit compile, and… nothing. Or worse, a screen full of garbage pixels. Classic.
Here’s kinda how it went down:
- Tried understanding the core scattering model. Felt like I got the gist.
- Attempted to implement the lookup tables he apparently uses. That part seemed okay initially.
- Integrating it into my existing simple renderer? That’s where things went sideways. Lots of weird interactions, colors blowing out, performance tanking unexpectedly.
- Spent hours tweaking parameters, debugging shader code line by line. Felt like I was just randomly changing numbers hoping for magic.
I remember this one evening, I was just staring at the screen, watching this ugly flickering mess that was supposed to be a beautiful sky. Bashed my head against the wall for a bit (metaphorically, mostly). It felt like I was missing some crucial piece of understanding.
After a few days of trying, I got something that vaguely resembled the effect, but only from certain angles and with terrible performance. It wasn’t the clean, fast solution I saw people talking about. It was a hack job, barely holding together.
So, where am I now with it? I put it on the back burner, honestly. Didn’t quite nail the Borislav Iliev magic. Learned a bit more about atmospheric scattering the hard way, though. Maybe I’ll revisit it someday when I feel like getting frustrated again. For now, my simple skybox stays.
