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Atom Sample Viewer

The Atom Sample Viewer showcases samples of features and rendering techniques that the Atom Renderer supports.

To do:
A GitHub issue has been created for this task here.

Quick Start

Before starting, you must get a local copy of the Atom Sample Viewer repository from GitHub and build it using Visual Studio. Follow the instructions in the Setting Up Atom Projects page to get set up.

To launch the Atom Sample Viewer, run AtomSampleViewerStandalone.exe located in the directory <build>/bin/profile. The following list of samples can be viewed in the Atom Sample Viewer.

Debug Menus

The following debug menus in the Atom Sample Viewer are tools for profiling and debugging systems across the rendering engine. You can run these tools while viewing samples in the Atom Sample Viewer.

Menu	Description
CPU Profiler	Provides CPU timing information, including the time spent working on RHI threads and on waiting for the GPU work to complete.
Culling Debug Window	Provides information on what the culling system is doing in real time.
GPU Profiler	Provides information on the GPU workload for each render pass.
Pass Tree	Displays a pass hierarchy and pass details.
Transient Attachment Profiler	Provides information about transient allocations that happen during a frame.

Graphics Feature Samples

The following samples demonstrate graphics features and rendering techniques that can enhance the visual effects in your simulation.

Sample	Description
Area Lights	Demonstrates different area light types with modifiable parameters.
Bloom	Demonstrates bloom effects with modifiable parameters.
Checkerboard Render Pipeline	Demonstrates how to set up a basic checkerboard render pipeline.
Depth of Field	Demonstrates the depth of field effect with modifiable parameters.
Diffuse Global Illumination	Demonstrates diffuse global illumination using ray-traced light probes.
Exposure	Demonstrates camera exposure with eye adaptation and other modifiable parameters.
Light Culling	Demonstrates the light culling system with configurable parameters to spawn a large amount of lights and decals.
Parallax	Demonstrates the effects of parallax mapping and pixel depth offset.
Shadow	Demonstrates shadow effects for directional lights and spot lights with a configurable lighting setup.
Shadowed Bistro	Similar to the Shadow sample, in a more complex scene.
Skinned Mesh	Demonstrates how to create skinned mesh, calculate bone transforms, and render using the Skinned Mesh Feature Processor.
SSAO	Demonstrates screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) with modifiable parameters.
SSR	Demonstrates screen space reflections (SSR) on different ground materials.
Tonemapping	Visualizes how ACES tone mapping affects various colors and levels of brightness.
Transparency	Demonstrates transparent materials.

Rendering Hardware Interface (RHI) Samples

The following samples demonstrate rendering features in the RHI.

Sample	Description
Alpha to Coverage	Demonstrates alpha to coverage, a multi-sampling technique for anti-aliasing.
Async Compute	Demonstrates the use of asynchronous compute to render meshes with shadows, and to apply simple tonemapping during post-processing.
Bindless Prototype	Explores a method for supporting bindless resources by allocating a sizeable float buffer.
Compute	Demonstrates the functionality of a dispatch pipeline by calculating a 2D fractal on a compute shader.
Copy Queue	Demonstrates queued uploads of data to the GPU while rendering.
Dual Source Blending	Demonstrates the functionality of dual source blending.
Indirect Rendering	Demonstrates indirect rendering by executing commands from the GPU rather than from the CPU.
Input Assembly	Demonstrates how to handle vertex buffer generation on a compute shader, and how to declare shader inputs.
MSAA	Demonstrates multisampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) on a simple triangle.
Multiple Views	Demonstrates how to render to multiple views.
Multi-Render Target	Demonstrates how to render to multiple targets, merge them together, and render the final output to the screen.
Multi-Thread	Demonstrates parallelization by the Frame Scheduler by executing multi-threaded command lists.
Multi-Viewport Swapchain	Demonstrates swap chains by animating colors across multiple screens.
Queries	Demonstrates query pools, which manage a collection of queries, for occlusion queries, predication, timestamp information, and pipeline statistics.
Ray Tracing	Demonstrates ray tracing against a simple scene.
Spherical Harmonics	Demonstrates functionalities provided by the spherical harmonics (SH) library.
Stencil	Tests the functionality of a stencil buffer.
Subpass	Demonstrates the use of a simple deferred renderer with two subpasses.
Swapchain	Demonstrates swap chains by animating colors on a single screen.
Texture	Demonstrates textures on a quad.
Texture3D	Demonstrates support for 3D images using the RHI’s Image structure. There are two structures to represent images: Image and Streaming Image.
Texture Array	Demonstrates support for image array descriptors and how to sample them with a uniform index.
Texture Map	Tests texture type functionality for the following: Texture1D, Texture1DArray, Texture2DArray, TextureCube, TextureCubeArray, and Texture3D.
Triangle	Demonstrates how to draw and animate a triangle on a screen. Also known as a “Hello Triangle” example.
Triangle Constant Buffer	Demonstrates how to animate triangles using a constant buffer.

Rendering Pipeline Interface (RPI) Samples

The following samples demonstrate rendering features in the RPI.

Sample	Description
Asset Load	Demonstrates the ability to quickly load meshes and render many objects at high frame rates.
Aux Geom	Demonstrates the AuxGeom feature (auxiliary geometry), which provides an interface for drawing geometry such as points, lines, polylines, triangles, AABBs, OBBs, spheres, cones, and cylinders.
Bistro Benchmark	Showcases many different features of Atom and allows profiling of all these systems working together.
Decal	Demonstrates decals on various objects with different materials and other modifiable properties.
Dynamic Draw	Demonstrates how to use the DynamicDrawContext API by rendering several pyramids with different render states.
Dynamic Material	Demonstrates support for multiple instances of a material, and how to update those material instances' properties in real time.
Material Hot Reload	Tests hot-reloading of material and shader assets by making changes to source data files.
Mesh	Demonstrates a single mesh and material. You can select from a collection of mesh and material.
MSAA	Demonstrates how to load a new pipeline with MSAA enabled, and a simple scene with a single mesh.
Multi-Render Pipeline	Demonstrates how to create two render pipelines.
Multi-Scene	Demonstrates how to create two RPI scenes with different content in each.
Multi-View Single Scene Aux Geom	Tests the ability to send draw calls to any selection of windows in a scene.
Root Constants	Demonstrates the use of root constants to pass information quickly from the CPU to the shader.
Scene Reload Soak	Tests Atom’s stability by repeatedly performing many different commands across various times. This sample is used to discover timing-sensitive issues.
Shading	Demonstrates rendering a shaderball with default StandardPBR material, with the LuxCore feature.
Streaming Image	Demonstrates a streaming image’s streaming process.