Course Description
Modern
video games employ a variety of sophisticated algorithms to produce
groundbreaking 3D rendering pushing the visual boundaries and interactive
experience of rich environments. This course brings state-of-the-art and
production-proven rendering techniques for fast, interactive rendering of
complex and engaging virtual worlds of video games.
This
year the course includes speakers from the makers of several innovative game
companies, such as Infinity Ward, id Software, Activision, Naughty Dog and
Unity Technologies. The course will cover a variety of topics relevant to the
practitioners of real-time rendering in games and other real-time 3D
applications.
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!
Previous years’
Advances course slides: go here
Syllabus
Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part I
Tuesday 25 August 2020 9am - 12:30pm PST |
Virtual Conference
Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part II
Wednesday, 26 August 2020 1pm - 3:30pm PST | Virtual Conference
Prerequisites
Working knowledge of modern real-time
graphics APIs like DirectX or Vulkan or Metal and a solid basis in commonly
used graphics algorithms. Familiarity with the concepts of programmable shading
and shading languages. Familiarity with shipping gaming consoles hardware and
software capabilities is a plus but not required.
Intended Audience
Technical practitioners and developers of
graphics engines for visualization, games, or effects rendering who are
interested in interactive rendering.
Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part I
Tuesday 25 August 2020 9am - 12:30pm PST |
Virtual Conference
9:00 am PST
Natalya
Tatarchuk (Unity Technologies)
Welcome and Introduction
9:13 am PST
Michal
Drobot (Infinity Ward | Activision)
Software-Based Variable Rate Shading in Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare
10:25 am PST
Jean Geffroy (iD Software), Axel Gneiting (iD Software), Yixin Wang (iD Software)
Rendering the Hellscape of Doom Eternal
11:10 am PST
Emmanuel
Turquin (Unity Technologies)
From Ray to Path Tracing: Navigating through
Dimensions
12:00 pm PST
All
speakers
Part I Closing Q&A
Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part II
Wednesday, 26 August 2020 1pm - 3:30pm
PST |
Virtual Conference
1:00 pm PST
Natalya
Tatarchuk (Unity Technologies)
Welcome (And Welcome Back!)
1:03 pm PST
Peter-Pike
Sloan (Activision), Ari Silvennoinen (Activision)
Precomputed Lighting Advances in Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare
2:05 pm
Waylon
Brinck (Naughty Dog), Qingzhou
(Steven) Tang (Naughty Dog)
The Technical Art of The Last of Us Part II
3:00 pm
All
speakers
Part II Q&A and Advances 2019 Closing Remarks
Course
Organizer
Natalya Tatarchuk (@mirror2mask) is a graphics engineer and a rendering enthusiast at heart. As the VP of
Graphics at Unity Technologies, she is focusing on driving the state-of-the-art
rendering technology and graphics performance for the Unity engine. Previously
she was the Graphics Lead and an Engineering Architect at Bungie, working on
innovative cross-platform rendering engine and game graphics for Bungie’s Destiny franchise, including leading
graphics on the upcoming Destiny 2 title.
Natalya also contributed graphics engineering to the Halo series, such as Halo:
ODST and Halo: Reach. Before
moving into game development full-time, Natalya was a graphics software
architect and a lead in the Game Computing Application Group at AMD Graphics
Products Group (Office of the CTO) where she pushed parallel computing
boundaries investigating advanced real-time graphics techniques. Natalya has
been encouraging sharing in the games graphics community for several decades,
largely by organizing a popular series of courses such as Advances in Real-time
Rendering and the Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering at SIGGRAPH. She has also published papers and articles at
various computer graphics conferences and technical book series, and has
presented her work at graphics and game developer conferences worldwide.
Natalya is a member of multiple industry and hardware advisory boards.
Software-Based Variable Rate Shading in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Abstract: This lecture covers a novel rendering
pipeline used in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2020). It enables a highly
customizable software-based variable rate shading—a method to render parts of
the render target at a resolution matching image frequency. As opposed to
hardware-based solutions which are restricted to a subset of available devices,
its software-based implementation makes it possible to achieve higher quality
and performance on a wide range of consumer hardware.
The lecture will present the design
process, resulting implementation, and in-depth examination of every stage of
the pipeline. This will include pre-pass rendering, variable-rate estimators,
novel and unique pixel packing schemes for compute shader kernels, and the
final frame rendering in our forward-plus renderer. Potential implementations
in other renderer types and job types will also be discussed, alongside
forward-looking extensions to better cater to many different use cases which
range across quality and performance.
Target audience is experienced
rendering engineers.
Bio: Michal Drobot is a Principal Rendering
Engineer at Infinity Ward, an Activision studio. Most recently he worked on the
rendering architecture of Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare and Call of Duty:
Infinite Warfare. Before that he helped in designing and optimizing the 3D
renderer in Far Cry 4 at Ubisoft Montreal. Prior to that he worked at Guerrilla
Games, designing and optimizing the rendering pipeline for the PlayStation 4
launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall.
Michal specializes in rendering algorithms, render architectures, hardware
architectures and low-level optimizations.
Materials (Updated: September 14th, 2020): PPTX Slides (129MB)
Rendering the Hellscape of Doom Eternal
Abstract: Achieving varied environments while maintaining 60 FPS was a key design
goal for idTech 7. This lecture will cover the
rendering systems that contribute to make the world of Doom: Eternal feel more
rich and dynamic, such as geometry caches, our updated gore system, decaling,
material compositing, and water rendering. The speakers will also explore
optimizations which allowed achieving the target frame rate on all platforms
and workflow improvements.
Bio:
Jean Geffroy is a
Principal Engine Programmer at id Software where he worked on Doom 2016, Wolfenstein 2, Dishonored 2,
Doom VFR and Doom Eternal. His primary focus is on general performance topics
and workflow improvements tailored to game needs. He previously worked on
character animation at Crytek on Ryse: Son of Rome
and other CryENGINE titles.
Yixin Wang is an
Engine Programmer at id Software, where he works on Doom Eternal. Doom Eternal is
the first title he's worked on. Before entering the gaming industry, he worked
at Google on Chrome networking.
Axel Gneiting is a Principal
Engine Programmer at id Software where he worked on Doom and Doom Eternal.
His primary focus is on performance, engine architecture and animation systems.
He previously worked as an engine programmer at Crytek on Ryse: Son of Rome.
Materials (Updated: September 21st, 2020): PPTX Slides (200MB), PDF
Slides (11 MB)
From Ray to Path Tracing: Navigating through Dimensions
Abstract: With recent advances in hardware, tracing
rays on a GPU is now more accessible than ever, and game engines have already
taken advantage of this by integrating ray-traced effects such as reflections,
soft shadows, ambient occlusion or global illumination into their real-time
pipelines, replacing when possible their screen-space, more approximate
counterparts. Most, if not all of those effects, are relying on a 2D Monte
Carlo integration.
Down the road, we can envision venturing into
higher dimensions to add more indirect bounces, or more distributed effects
(DOF, motion blur), getting closer to full path tracing. This will require
adapted sampling schemes, guaranteeing the best use of the typically limited
real-time/interactive budgets. This is a territory that has already been well
covered in offline rendering, and this presentation will introduce some
concepts and lessons (while helping to avoid specific traps) we can also
benefit from in real-time.
Bio: Emmanuel Turquin joined Unity Technologies' Paris rendering team in 2019, where he
focuses on real-time/interactive ray and path tracing, following a dozen years
of R&D in offline production rendering, shared between The Bakery animation
studio, and VFX houses DNEG and Industrial Light & Magic.
Materials (Updated: September 14th, 2020): PPTX
Slides (43MB)
Precomputed Lighting Advances in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Abstract: This talk covers extensions and
improvements in the precomputed lighting pipeline used in Call of Duty: Modern
Warfare. We briefly discuss several improvements to the baking and run-time to
increase the quality and consistency of the results. We describe how we exploit
properties of the projection of non-negative functions to more efficiently
encode spherical harmonics, how lighting static models has evolved since our
2017 presentation and a reconstruction technique that “hallucinates” higher
frequencies from linear SH. We also describe implementation details that enable
us to efficiently update our precomputing lighting representation when lights
flicker or get shot out, and when doors open and close.
Bio:
Peter-Pike Sloan is a Technical
Fellow at Activision, heading up a small graphics research group in Washington
state. Prior to that he has worked at NVIDIA, Disney and Microsoft. His
research has been used extensively in the games industry and he has published
papers in animation, skinning, simulation and interactive rendering. His papers
are available online at:
http://www.ppsloan.org/publications/
Ari Silvennoinen is a Senior Technical Director at
Activision, where he works on graphics technology research and development.
Prior to joining Activision, he obtained a M.S. degree in Computer Science from
University of Helsinki and worked on graphics technology at Umbra Software,
Remedy Entertainment and Aalto University. His main interests are in path
tracing, global illumination and real-time rendering and he has published
research papers at various computer graphics conferences and journals,
including ACM TOG, SIGGRAPH, I3D, CGF and EGSR (available online at https://arisilvennoinen.github.io/).
Materials (Updated: September 14th, 2020): PPTX
Slides (73 MB)
The Technical Art of The Last of Us Part
II
Abstract: This talk presents a handful
of shading features created by the technical artists at Naughty Dog for The Last of Us Part II. Some of the
methods and techniques in this presentation are novel, some are iterations of
common concepts, and all of them are applied to a particular production need of
The Last of Us Part II.
The features presented include
enhancements to eye rendering, a surface wetness feature, a system for fake cubemap-based interiors with breakable glass, our
deformable snow tech, and other examples from throughout the game's
development. We also present a high-level look at our Uber-Shader, and the
introduction of a new rendering element: Heightmaps. These are all presented in a way that can be
easily understood and applied to any game engine, and most come with code
snippets.
More broadly, these examples are
wrapped in a theme of "how to be a good tech artist". We discuss
building a healthy relationship with programmers, when to hack vs when to do it
the right way, how to match the look of real-world phenomena, and setting high
standards for code and math quality.
Bio:
Waylon Brinck is the Technical Art Director at Naughty Dog,
specializing in rendering, shading, lighting, optimization, and generally anything
it takes to give the team the tools and features it needs. Previously he worked
at Epic Games/People Can Fly, Electronic Arts, and Guild Software.
While Steven Tang only got into the video game
industry through a series of coincidences, he has loved visual art and
specifically pretty pixels since his early high school years. In 2018, shortly
after his college graduation, Steven joined Naughty Dog as one of the youngest
members on the Tech Art team. He worked on The Last of Us Part II with a focus
on shaders and rendering. He's having a lot of fun at work.
Materials (Updated: September 14th, 2020): PPTX Slides (156 MB)
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