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Rendering of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

mdrobot — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 00:39:08 GMT

This lecture presents a technical deep dive into COD:IW renderer and the architectural design process behind it. Numerous topics will be covered: shadows, particle rendering, reflections, refractions, global illumination, volumetric rendering and Forward+ rendering.
This talk will guide you through high level interactions between those core subsystems, their design, as well as unveil some novel optimizations and image quality improvements. Finally, the lecture will show specific approaches to performance scaling, that allow fluid 60hz gameplay at 1080p on current generation consoles. The target audience is rendering engineers as well as technical artists interested in learning about modern methods for 60hz titles.

Click here to view the full presentation in: PDF

Click here to download the full presentation in: PowerPoint

Ambient Dice

miciwan — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 00:48:11 GMT

We present a family of basis functions designed to accurately and efficiently represent illumination signals on the unit sphere.
The bases are built of locally supported functions, needing three to six basis functions in a given direction.

Click here for the complete paper: PDF

Fast Filtering of Reflection Probes

CTRND — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:00:56 GMT

Game and movie studios are switching to physically based rendering en masse, but physically accurate filter convolution is
difficult to do quickly enough to update reflection probes in real-time. Cubemap filtering has also become a bottleneck in the
content processing pipeline. We have developed a two-pass filtering algorithm that is specialized for isotropic reflection kernels,
is several times faster than existing algorithms, and produces superior results. The first pass uses a quadratic b-spline recurrence
that is modified for cubemaps. The second pass uses lookup tables to determine optimal sampling in terms of placement, mipmap level,
and coefficients. Filtering a full 1282 cubemap on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 takes between 160 μs and 730 μs with our method,
depending on the desired quality.

Click here to download the complete paper: PDF

Filmic SMAA: Sharp Morphological and Temporal Antialiasing

CTRND — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 17:41:31 GMT

From Siggraph 2016, our antialiasing technique for games.

Click here to download complete presentation: PowerPoint PPTX

ATVI-TR-16-02: Practical Order Independent Transparency

CTRND — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 17:35:23 GMT

Transparencies have always been a tricky problem for games, to render them correctly you have to draw them in front-to-back order from the view of the camera, traditionally this means to sort them when you do this you have to break apart material batches and sometimes even meshes, which affects performance. Order Independent Transparency (OIT) solves all these problems but simple implementations severely limit the number of layers of transparencies you can have. This document describes a method that combines OIT with software rasterized sprites via compute shaders, which we’ll call ”Compute Sprites”. Most of our transparent layers were due to particles, the Compute Sprites efficiently take care of most of them, which allows for a practical implementation of OIT for the remaining mesh transparencies in the scene.

Click here for the full technical report: PDF

Efficient GPU Rendering of Subdivision Surfaces

CTRND — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:03:20 GMT

We present a novel method for real-time rendering of subdivision surfaces whose goal is to make subdivision faces as easy to render as triangles, points, or lines. Our approach uses standard GPU tessellation hardware and processes each face of a base mesh independently, thus allowing an entire model to be rendered in a single pass. The key idea of our method is to subdivide the u, v domain of each face ahead of time, generating a quadtree structure, and then submit one tessellated primitive per input face. By traversing the quadtree for each post-tessellation vertex, we are able to accurately and efficiently evaluate the limit surface.

Click below to download the complete paper and supporting documents:

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGTviYwolE

Bib TeX: http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/papers/2016/4subdiv/brainerd2016efficient.bib

PDF: http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/papers/2016/4subdiv/brainerd2016efficient.pdf

Stanford Project: http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/brainerd2016efficient.html

Volumetric Global Illumination at Treyarch

CTRND — Thu, 04 May 2017 22:28:36 GMT

We present a solution for indirect diffuse lighting as an alternative to traditional lightmaps. The primary goals were to reduce light baking times, and to allow the lighting to apply to moving objects and effects with the same quality as the environment. Our solution was to use carefully placed irradiance volumes. These were baked using a unique image-based sampling approach that makes use of multiple input images. We also discuss the evolution of this idea and the many caveats and dead ends we experienced along the way.

Click here to see the full PowerPoint: SparseShadowTree PPTX

Practical Real-Time Strategies for Accurate Indirect Occlusion

CTRND — Thu, 04 May 2017 20:47:53 GMT

We present new systems for occlusion of indirect lighting: GTAO for screen-space ambient occlusion, which yield superior results than the current state of the art (HBAO) while being as fast as one of the fastest screen-space techniques (HemiAO), and GTSO, which is a series of approximations that accurately model specular occlusion under probe lighting.

Click here for the complete presentation: Power Point

Sparse Shadow Trees

CTRND — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 17:37:32 GMT

Lighting large outdoor scenes continues to present a challenge for realtime rendering. Cascaded shadowmaps are costly to render over large areas, and baked lightmaps are expensive and require an unique parametrization over the entire scene. We present a technique that allows for baking shadowmaps on large outdoors area with minimal memory consumption that is amenable to deferred rendering.

Click here to download the complete presentation: PowerPoint

Click here to download the complete paper: Paper PDF

ATVI-TR-16-01: Practical Realtime Strategies for Accurate Indirect Occlusion

CTRND — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 19:06:30 GMT

Ambient occlusion is ubiquitous in games and other real-time applications
to approximate global illumination effects. However there
is no analytic solution to ambient occlusion integral for arbitrary
scenes, and using general numerical integration algorithms is too
slow, so approximations used in practice often are empirically made
to look pleasing even if they don’t accurately solve the AO integral.
In this work we introduce a new formulation of ambient occlusion,
GTAO, which is able to match a ground truth reference in half a
millisecond on current console hardware. This is done by using
an alternative formulation of the ambient occlusion equation, and
an efficient implementation which distributes computation using
spatio-temporal filtering. We then extend GTAO with a novel technique
that takes into account near-field global illumination, which
is lost when using ambient occlusion alone. Finally, we introduce a
technique for specular occlusion, GTSO, symmetric to ambient occlusion
which allows to compute realistic specular reflections from
probe-based illumination. Our techniques are efficient, give results
close to the ray-traced ground truth, and have been integrated in
recent AAA console titles.

Click here to read the full technical report: PDF