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

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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)