The Graphics Features That Make SL's Black Dragon Special

My post last week on the third party Black Dragon viewer generated a pretty interesting (occasionally over-snarky) comment thread, culminating in a long comment by the Dragon's creator himself, NiranV Dean, who gets into the nuts and bolts of publishing a pretty popular viewer coded by a single person (namely, NiranV Dean). He details, for example, the rendering features that make Black Dragon unique, and more like a next gen graphics engine:

While all viewers except those made from scratch like the mobiles use the same rendering code, some do have some extra rendering features that other viewers do not have. Examples for my Viewer would be:

• Screen Space Reflections
• Volumetric Lighting (Godrays)
• Motion Blur
• Tone Mapping
• Color Correction
• Vignette

Also these are just completely new ones, on top of that there are also alterations of the rendering/shader code of several default features like Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Shadows, Depth of Field, all of them look slightly different or use different algorithms, therefor making other viewers unable to produce the same exact image without implementing these changes as well.

That's quite impressive, and yet more reasons to try and get it running on my old ass Alienware.)

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Comments

[Gordon]

"That's quite impressive, and yet more reasons to try and get it running on my old ass Alienware.)"

These extra rendering features are not for free an need some hardware power. I'm not sure your Alienware will handle it. On top of this, the latest version of Black Dragon supports only ALM rendering (in the BD viewer it's called Deferred). There is still a box to switch it on or off, but don't use it. It will only create pixel trash.

If your laptop is able to run Black Dragon, then press the F1 key to open the sidebar, search for the Color Correction option and activate it. In my opinion, this is the biggest difference in rendering compared to the ordinary viewers.

[NiranV Dean]

I made some basic comparison shots

Comparison #1 (Screen Space Reflections & Volumetric Lighting)

Comparison #2 (Better look at Volumetric Lighting)

Comparison #3 (Direct SIM comparison of Blue Galaxy)

Comparison #4 (Every day usage comparison, no SSR, no Volumetric Lighting)

All of them use somewhat stock settings on both Viewers, i used the exact same Windlight settings for both Viewers, same Draw Distance and same basic features (Shadows, Ambient Occlusion etc), i also moved the camera as close to the same position as possible on scenes where i couldn't rez a camera control object.

I want to note here that the biggest daily differences are small, they primarily focus on small scale enhancements which contribute to the overall look of the picture. Some scenes portrait this better than others. Clubs for example do this very badly as shadows and ambient occlusion for example are often hardly visible.