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 best of graphics practices and research from the game development community, and providing practical and production-proven algorithms.

 

The first part of this course will include speakers from the makers of several award-winning games, such as Bungie, Media Molecule, Crytek, EA and DICE. The topics will include practical methods of real games’ rendering pipeline breakdown, deferred rendering improvements, complex lighting techniques, scene voxelization and participating media, and other exciting production secrets!

 

The second part of this course includes speakers from the makers of several award-winning games, such as Electronic Arts (DICE, Black Box and EA Vancouver), Treyarch, Sony Online, and CCP Games.

 

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)


Making Game Worlds from Polygon Soup: Visibility, Spatial hierarchy and Rendering Challenges
Hao Chen (Bungie), Ari Silvennoinen (Umbra Software), Natalya Tatarchuk (Bungie)

Rendering in Cars 2
Christopher Hall (Avalanche Software), Robert Hall (Avalanche Software) and David Edwards (Avalanche Software)


Secrets of CryENGINE 3  Graphics Technology
Tiago Sousa (Crytek), Nickolay Kasyan (Crytek), and Nicolas Schulz (Crytek)

Two uses of Voxels in LittleBigPlanet2’s graphics engine
Alex Evans (MediaMolecule), and Anton Kirczenow (MediaMolecule)

 

More Performance! Five Rendering Ideas from Battlefield 3 and Need For Speed: The Run
John White (EA Black Box), Colin Barre-Brisebois (EA Montreal)

 
Physically-based lighting in Call of Duty: Black Ops

Dimitar Lazarov, Treyarch

 

Real-time image quilting: Arbitrary material blends, invisible seams, and no repeats

Hugh Malan (CCP Games)

 

Dynamic lighting in God of War 3

Vassily Filippov (Sony Santa Monica)

 

Pre-Integrated Skin Shading

Eric Penner (Google, formerly EA Vancouver)

 

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 rendering engine and game graphics for the unannounced title at Bungie. 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 16th 2011)

PowerPoint Slides (6.43 MB)

 

 

 

 

 

Making Game Worlds from Polygon Soup: Visibility, Spatial Hierarchy and Rendering Challenges

Abstract: This talk will cover how Bungie is approaching building their game worlds from polygon soups for the upcoming unannounced title. Specifically, the authors will describe how they solve the challenges for visibility, special hierarchy and rendering pipeline. First, Halo Reach pipeline for generating game worlds from content all the way through to rendering will be presented, with the emphasis on visibility, spatial connectivity and rendering. Then Bungie and Umbra Software will describe a collaboration for a novel solution for visibility and spatial connectivity developed for automatic portal generation as well as a number of practical solutions geared for production pipelines. Finally, the authors will present a forward-looking solution for parallelizing visibility and rendering computation for current and next-generation platforms.

 

Presenters:

Hao Chen (Bungie), Ari Silvennoinen (Umbra Software) and Natalya Tatarchuk (Bungie)

Affiliation:

Bungie / Umbra Software

Bios:

Hao Chen is the graphics architect and one of the engineering leads for Bungie Studio, where he currently leads the research and development of Bungie’s next generation graphics engine. He was the graphics engineering lead of Halo3. Prior to that, Hao has worked on numerous game titles for Microsoft and Bungie on the Xbox and PC platforms, including Outwars, AMPED1, AMPED2, and Halo2.

Natalya Tatarchuk is currently working on state-of-the art next-gen rendering engine and game graphics for the unannounced title at Bungie. 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.

Ari Silvennoinen is Principal Programmer at Umbra Software, where he is responsible for rendering technology R&D. His primary areas of interest include visibility algorithms, real-time shadow techniques and rendering optimization in general. Ari holds a Master’s degree in computer science from University of Helsinki and has previously worked with the 3D research group at Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University School of Science and Technology).

 

Materials:
(Updated August 24th 2011)

PowerPoint Slides (7MB)

 

 

 

 

Rendering in Cars 2

Abstract: In this talk, the authors will describe various rendering techniques used in Cars 2: The Video Game.  Among these, they will discuss work in offloading post-processing onto the Playstation 3's SPU's.  This includes using the SPU's to render stereographic 3D images without affecting performance of the game while maintaining full visual quality, resolution, and a full 3d experience for up to 4 players. They will also discuss ways of dealing with potential stereo 3D artifacts and a comparison between SPU and GPU rendering. In addition, they will present new developments in color precision, post processing effects, and shadows. Lastly the authors will explain light probes, and the ways they were used for lighting.  This includes an overview of probe capture, the volume representation, and ways to make it more artist-controllable.

 

Presenters:

Chris Hall (Avalanche Software, Disney Games)

Robert Hall (Avalanche Software, Disney Games)

David Edwards (Avalanche Software, Disney Games)

 

Bios:

Chris Hall is a programmer at Avalanche Software working on graphics technology.  During the last three years, he worked on Bolt, Toy Story 3, and Cars 2 specifically developing improved ambient lighting using spherical harmonics.  Additionally he has worked on particle lighting and various post processing effects.  Previously, he received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science at Utah State University. 

Rob Hall is currently working at Avalanche Software as a programmer for the last three years.  During this time, he has implemented effects in post processing, shadows, and deferred rendering.  He graduated from Utah State University with a BS (2006) and MS (2008) in Computer Science.   His current interests include shadows, global illumination, and GPGPU.

David Edwards is a graphics programmer at Avalanche Software where he has developed the PS3 graphics system. He loves to find new ways to push the PS3 renderer. He has worked on graphics systems over the past nine years. Prior work experience includes working at a couple great independent game studios, and at THQ. He graduated from Utah State University with a BS in Computer Science in 2003.

 

Materials:
(Updated August 17th 2011)

PPT Slides (129 MB)

Video (50 MB)

 

Secrets of CryENGINE 3  Graphics Technology

Abstract: In this talk, the authors will describe an overview of a different method for deferred lighting approach used in CryENGINE 3, along with an in-depth description of the many techniques used to optimize light passes and avoid light leaking, including details regarding rendering of light volumes, platform specific optimizations, stereoscoping 3D rendering and their shadowing techniques.

Presenters:

Tiago Sousa (Crytek), Nickolay Kasyan (Crytek), and Nicolas Schulz (Crytek)

Bios:

Tiago Sousa is Crytek’s Principal R&D Graphics Engineer, where he has worked for past 8 years, on all Crytek numerous demos, shipped game titles and engines, including Far Cry, Crysis and more recently finished Crysis 2 - Crytek’s first multiplatform game. He is a self-taught graphics programmer, who before joining Crytek army on the cause of world domination, cofounded a pioneering game development team in Portugal and very briefly studied computer science at Instituto Superior Técnico, which he still has hopes to finish one day. He spend most of his time thinking out of the box, inventing his own general solutions for any fun computer graphics related problem.

Nickolay Kasyan is a Senior Rendering Engineer in Crytek, where he is working on graphics technology and engine design for the past 7 years. He had received an M.S. in computer science from the Kharkov National University of Radio Electronics. Soon after passion to computer graphics led him to development of 3d engines and later to Crytek. Nickolay has worked on titles such as Crysis, Crysis Warhead and recent Crysis 2. He's now concentrated on development of graphics technology for the next Crytek's products.

Nicolas Schulz is a Graphics Engineer at Crytek, where he works as part of the R&D Core Team. He is working on visual quality and performance improvements to CryENGINE 3 across all platforms and was responsible for the Stereo-3D implementation in Crysis 2. Before joining Crytek, Nicolas worked on various academic research projects, including Augmented Reality applications, crowd simulation and high-quality rendering of virtual characters. During that time, he also wrote several advanced rendering engines with a strong focus on software design.

 

Materials:
(Updated August 18th 2011)

Slides and videos (Zip file, 176 MB)

PowerPoint Slides (48 MB)

 

 

Two Uses of Voxels in LittleBigPlanet2’s Graphics Engine

Abstract: The authors will describe a PlayStation 3-centric implementation of real-time dynamic scene voxelization and demonstrate two ways this voxel representation was used for rendering and special effects in the game LittleBigPlanet 2.

Presenter:

Alex Evans and Anton Kirczenow

Affiliation:

MediaMolecule

Bio:

Alex Evans started life as demo coder and R&D graphics programmer at renowned UK game studios Bullfrog and Lionhead. After dalliances with realtime generative visuals for Warp Records, he realised that ‘Creative Gaming’ was where he wanted to be. To that end, in 2006 he co-founded Media Molecule with 5 friends, where they produced the critically acclaimed LittleBigPlanet for PS3 / Sony – with the sequel recently released in January 2011. His interests continue to be in graphics programming, particularly volumetric techniques and stylised lighting. His motto is ‘just blur and add noise...’

Anton Kirczenow is a Vancouver-born, England-living graphics programmer who worked on LittleBigPlanet 1 & 2 at Media Molecule, Black & White 2 and Fable 2 at Lionhead, RenderWare at Criterion & Impossible Creatures at Relic. He holds a BSc in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University, and an AS (Applied Shredding) degree on the guitars.

 

Materials:
(Updated August 16th 2011)

PDF Slides (34.7 MB)

 

 

More Performance! Five Rendering Ideas from Battlefield 3 and Need for Speed: The Run

Abstract: In this talk, the authors will describe several techniques from the upcoming Battlefield 3 and Need for Speed: The Run titles designed to accelerate the rendering behind these games. The goal of their techniques is to increase performance without visual quality sacrifice. They will focus on a novel DirectX 9+ scatter-gather approach to Bokeh rendering, z-buffer reverse-reload tricks for faster shadow, chroma sub-sampling for faster full-screen effects, improved temporally-stable dynamic ambient occlusion and tile-based deferred shading on Xbox 360.

 

Presenter:

John White (EA Black Box), Colin Barré-Brisebois (EA Montréal / DICE)

Bio:

John White (@ZedCull) is a Senior Rendering Engineer at Electronic Arts Black Box working on Need For Speed: The Run. He works in all areas of rendering development and specializes in both low-level GPU optimizations and high-level rendering architecture. Having previously presented at GDC, his current focus is on post-processing techniques, local and global lighting, shadowing and level-of-detail techniques. Prior to working at EA, John worked at Deep Red Games in the UK. At Deep Red, John architected and developed the in-house rendering run-time and tool-chain which powered their PC-based strategy games. Before this, John worked at Gremlin Interactive where he resided in the R&D department and developed their in-house low-level rasterization, math and Win32 libraries. Published games include Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, Skate 2, Skate 1, NBA Live 07, NBA Live 06, Vegas Tycoon, Monopoly Tycoon, Risk II, Actua Soccer 3 and Actual Tennis.

Colin Barré-Brisebois (@ZigguratVertigo) is a rendering programmer at EA, somewhere between Montréal (EA Montréal) and Stockholm (DICE), working on Battlefield 3 and Frostbite 2. In the past six years at EA, he has contributed to franchises such as Battlefield, Army of TWO, Skate, Medal of Honor, Need for Speed and Boogie. On a daily basis, Colin also plays an intermediary role in the studio, connecting art directors, artists, and technical artists and rendering programmers who share common goals in terms of graphics and game development. Through various presentations and publications, both internal and public (GPU Pro II, GDC 2011), his rendering techniques are being implemented in several projects at various EA studios. Colin has been interested in graphics and video game development since he began toying with computers in 1989: this includes involvement during the BBS days, the arcade emulator scene, as well as mod programming.

 

Materials:
(Updated August 16th 2011)

PowerPoint Slides (14 MB)

PDF Slides (2 MB)

 

Physically-based lighting in Call of Duty: Black Ops

Abstract: In this talk, Dimitar Lazarov will present the lighting engine of Call of Duty: Black Ops and discuss the fundamental restrictions imposed by targeting 60 fps. He will overview the premise behind physically based lighting, why it was chosen for adoption in Call of Duty: Black Ops and recount the major technical and non-technical hurdles that were encountered during the implementation and deployment.

Dimitar will provide an in-depth analysis of the specular portion of the BRDF, overview the different distribution functions, shadow-masking functions, Fresnel effect approximations, etc., and discuss the ones that had the best visual / performance trade-off for Call of Duty: Black Ops.  Additionally, Dimitar will show two important algorithms that were essential in achieving a physically believable specular – roughness-driven pre-filtered and normalized reflection probes and roughness mip-map augmentation with normal mip-map variance. Finally, Dimitar will discuss how physically based lighting affects the authoring of art assets and some potential difficulties the Art team could encounter in the transition to physically based lighting.

 

Presenter:

Dimitar Lazarov

Affiliation:

Treyarch

Bio:

Dimitar Lazarov is a Lead Graphics Engineer at Treyarch, an Activision Blizzard studio. He has over a decade of experience in game development and has worked on a diverse portfolio of games, ranging from kids friendly titles such as ‘Casper Spirit Dimensions’ and ‘Kung Fu Panda’ to action blockbusters such as ‘Medal of Honor European Assault’, ‘True Crime New York City’ and ‘Call of Duty Black Ops’. Dimitar’s main expertise is graphics programming and performance optimizations, and he is often involved in system and core engineering, tools programming and other areas that need his attention to detail.

 

Materials:
(Updated August 16th 2011)

PowerPoint Slides (10 MB)

 

 

 

Real-time Image Quilting: Arbitrary Material Blends, Invisible Seams, and No Repeats

Abstract: In this presentation, the author will describe a method for implementing image quilting in the pixel shader.  This technique provides solutions for situations where standard environment texturing has problems: transitions between arbitrary neighbor materials (such as asphalt to earth), localized texture features due to custom geometry (such as rust stains down a wall from a metal structure), and edge effects (such as damage along edges of an arbitrary concrete shape). Production and implementation issues will also be covered, including techniques for sharing vertices and substantially reducing vertex size.

 

 

Presenter:

Hugh Malan

Affiliation:

CCP Games

Bio:

Hugh Malan is a senior graphics programmer working on Dust 514 at CCP, in Newcastle.  Previously he worked as graphics lead for Crackdown and MyWorld for Realtime Worlds, and developed the "Realworldz" realtime procedural planet demo for 3Dlabs.  Hugh is a graduate of Victoria University and Otago University, New Zealand.

 

Materials:
(Updated August 17th 2011)

PowerPoint Slides (22 MB)

 

Dynamic lighting in God of War 3

Abstract: In this session, the author will discuss a novel forward lighting approach that was used in God of War 3 to create rich, dynamically-lit environment with dozens of light sources applied to a single pixel. The author will describe how lights were combined using Playstation 3’s SPU architecture to create a single aggregate light for each vertex. Additionally, a new light interpolation approach which improves resulting lighting accuracy and reduces visual errors will be presented, as well as description of how the aggregate lights are applied in real-time per pixel on the Playstation 3’s graphics processing unit, the RSX. Complete mathematical explanation of the algorithm will be presented in the talk. Usability constraints, edge cases and ways to reduce artifacts are covered in detail.

Presenter:

Vassily Filipov

Affiliation:

Sony Santa Monica

Bio:

Vassily Fillipov is a Lead Game Programmer at Sony Santa Monica. Vassily started in the games industry as a graphics engineer at Sierra On-Line in 1997. He moved on to Sony after writing engines and AI for PC and Xbox for 7 years. Vassily has been Lead Engine Programmer on God of War 3 before switching to the Game side of development.

 

Materials:
(Updated August 17th 2011)

PowerPoint Slides (4.5 MB)

Video (118 MB)

 

 

Pre-Integrated Skin Shading

Abstract: In this presentation, the author will describe a technique for rendering realistic skin in games, discussing an approach where rather than gathering neighboring light to simulate subsurface scattering,
the effects of scattered light are pre-integrated, which allows achieving the non-local effects of subsurface scattering using only locally stored information and a customized shading model. Tricks for shadow mapping as well as the importance of tone-mapping are also discussed.

 

Presenter:

Eric Penner

Affiliation:

EA Vancouver

Bio:

Eric Penner is an engineer at Google on Chrome. Prior to that Eric was a rendering engineer at Electronic Arts where he shipped several Playstation 3 / Xbox 360 titles and worked on creative R&D. Eric enjoys developing real-time algorithms in traditional and volume-rendering pipelines. Some of his latest work includes two chapters in the recent book GPU Pro 2 (Pre-integrated Skin Shading and Pixel Quad Amortization).

 

Materials:
(Updated August 17th 2011)

PowerPoint Slides (9 MB)

 

 

Contact: