Course Description

Advances in the real-time graphics research and the ever-increasing power of mainstream GPUs and consoles continues generating an explosion of innovative algorithms suitable for fast, interactive rendering of complex and engaging virtual worlds.

 

Every year the latest video games display a vast variety of sophisticated algorithms resulting in ground-breaking 3D rendering pushing the visual boundaries and interactive experience of rich environments. The focus of this course lies in bridging the game development community and the state-of-the-art 3D graphics research, encouraging cross-pollination of knowledge for future games and other interactive applications. 

 

This course is the next installment in the now-established series of Siggraph courses on real-time rendering, bringing the newest and best of graphics practices and research from the game development community, and providing practical and production-proven algorithms.

 

This year the course includes speakers from the makers of award-winning games, such as Bungie, Valve, DICE, Crytek, Avalanche / Disney, Naughty Dog; middleware providers such as Geomerics; and the leading IHVs such as AMD and Intel. The talks will cover wide range of relevant topics such as character rendering and shading models, global illumination, shadowing solutions, a plethora of practical production systems for game development, such as artist-directable water flow pipeline, destructible environments, and particle effects.

 

This is the course to attend if you are in the game development industry or want to learn the latest and greatest techniques in real-time rendering domain!


Halo Reach (Xbox 360)
Developed by Bungie
Published by Microsoft (Fall 2010)

Syllabus

Introduction: Graphics Feature Development for Games

Natalya Tatarchuk (Bungie)

Rendering techniques in Toy Story 3

John-Paul Ownby, Robert Hall and Christopher Hall (Avalanche / Disney)

A Real-Time Radiosity Architecture for Video Game

Sam Martin (Geomerics), Per Einarsson (DICE)

Real-Time Order Independent Transparency and Indirect Illumination using Direct3D 11

Jason Yang, Jay McKee (AMD)

CryENGINE 3: Reaching the Speed of Light

Anton Kaplanyan (Crytek)

Sample Distribution Shadow Maps

Andrew Lauritzen (Intel)

Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps

Marco Salvi (Intel)

Uncharted 2: Character Lighting and Shading

John Hable (Naughty Dog)

Destruction Masking in Frostbite 2 using Volume Distance Fields

Robert Kihl (DICE)

Water Flow in Portal 2

Alex Vlachos (Valve)

 

Introduction: Graphics Feature Development for Games

Abstract: In this talk we cover the practical motivation for graphics feature development for games, describe the requirements for successful integration of visual elements into games and introduce the speakers for the rest of the course.

 

Presenter:

Natalya Tatarchuk

Affiliation:

Bungie

Bio:

Natalya Tatarchuk is currently working on state-of-the art next-gen game graphics algorithms and the rendering engine at Bungie, LLC.  Previously she was a graphics software architect and a project lead in the Game Computing Application Group at AMD Graphics Products Group (Office of the CTO) where she pushed parallel computing boundaries investigating innovative real-time graphics techniques. Additionally, she had been the lead of ATI’s demo team creating the innovative interactive renderings and the lead for the tools group at ATI Research. She has published papers and articles in various computer graphics conferences and technical book series, and has presented her work at graphics and game developer conferences worldwide.

 

Materials:
(Updated August 8th 2010)

PowerPoint Slides (8.29 MB)

PDF Slides (1.4 MB)

 

 

 

 

 

Rendering techniques in Toy Story 3

Abstract: We will talk about the evolution of the lighting and shadow techniques used in Toy Story 3.   We will discuss not only the technology behind those methods that ended up in the final game, but also some of the alternatives that were tried along the way and why these failed to meet our needs (either technically or from our artists’ standpoint).  Among other subjects, we will discuss our approach to ambient lighting, screen space ambient occlusion, and shadows.

 

Presenters:

John-Paul Ownby, Robert Hall and Christopher Hall

Affiliation:

Avalanche / Disney

Bios