level of detail

Stephen Hill (Ubisoft) posted the slides to his awesome GDC 2010 talk entitled “The Rendering Tools And Techniques Of Splinter Cell: Conviction”. Stephen discusses hierarchical-Z based occlusion culling and an “ambient occlusion fields”-like AO solution that shipped with the game.  Stephen’s occlusion culling technique was inspired by the occlusion culling in the ATI Froblins demo (described here). The AO technique splats analytic occlusion results onto the scene ala AO Fields and the sphere AO we used in the ATI Ping Pong Demo (summarized in the article “Deferred Occlusion from Analytic Surfaces” in ShaderX7). Great material. It’s presentations like this that are making me kick myself for not going to GDC this year.

Here are the slides for my presentation ‘Mixed Resolution Rendering’ at GDC’09.

Here are a few relevant previous blog entries:

Keepin’ it Low Res

Let’s Have a Min/Max Party

Imperfect Shadow Maps

Geometry-Aware Framebuffer Level of Detail

I haven’t been posting much lately. What I have been posting has been other people’s stuff rather than any original thoughts. I’ve been pursuing several different topics but I can’t post about them because they may end up being used at work. Anyway, if you’re looking for lots of interesting graphics links, you should start/keep reading the Real-time Rendering blog. You should read the Real-time Rendering book too (though I haven’t got a copy myself, yet). From here on out I think I’m just going to stick to posting things that I am doing myself and content related to it.

Screenshot of a real-time technique described in an article I wrote to be published in ShaderX7

Edit: I should add that the title “What’s going on here?!” is referring to what’s been going on with the blog. It’s not a request for people to guess what is going on in the picture (but you can do that too).

So.. it’s been about 2 months since I posted on this blog. I have every intention of posting again!  I have been crunching like a mutha for the past two months and haven’t had time to form coherent, non-demo related thoughts let alone do normal things like prepare my own food or enjoy a sunny afternoon. But that’s over now, so I hope to start updating this blog regularly.  I realized that I haven’t posted anything related to demos that I’ve worked on at ATI so I might do that first.  Coming soon.

Christer Ericson at the realtimecollisiondetection blog put up a well-written little post about why it’s ok to totally fake everything. In his case, he is referring to AI, but I like to this think this way about graphics (specifically, lighting) too. Recommended reading!

Appear smarter by moving in the right circles 

I found out last week that I’ll be going to SIGGRAPH. This is only my second year going so I am pretty excited. Anybody else that’s reading this going? I’m looking forward to the “Advanced Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games” course, the Pixar half-day course, the hair modeling/rendering course and a whole ton of papers/sketches. The procedural urban modeling course should be interesting too. That area seems really popular/important right now.

Post SIGGRAPH events that you are looking forward to in the comments. I’d imagine that most people are probably like myself and haven’t really sat down and absorbed the program to see what’s going on there.

The majority of the papers from this year’s Eurographics conference are linked to from this site. A few have caught my eye. I hope to post some thoughts on them some time this week.

Cheers

I think SIGGRAPH course notes are invaluable and aren’t something I remember to look for when I’m sort of passively thinking of reading up on some random graphics topics. Anyway, the volume rendering course from SIGGRAPH 2004 is one that I’ve referred back to many times. The visual quality of volume rendering was increasing by leaps and bounds around this time thanks to increasingly flexible GPUs and lots of great research. Lots of great information on GPU ray casting and making beautiful transfer functions (a mapping of volume properties to color and opacity), and general information on light transport in media. Worth a read, for sure.

Course notes and slides!

SIGGRAPH 2006 Course notes and slides available online. It’s a bit basic, but good for anyone starting out in graphics

Course Description

“This course discusses the practical implementation of physically-principled reflectance models in interactive graphics and video games, in current practice as well as upcoming technologies. The course begins with the visual phenomena important to the perception of reflectance in real-world materials, which it uses as background for the underlying theory and derivation of common reflectance models. After introducing the current game development pipeline, from content creation to rendering, the course then discusses rendering techniques for implementing reflectance models in games — with emphasis on real-world trade offs such as shader performance, content creation efficiency, resource size considerations, and overall rendering quality. The course will help a researcher understand constraints in the game development pipeline and it will help a game developer understand the physical phenomena underlying reflectance models.”