level of detail

Fantasy Lab, the game development studio started by Mike Bunnell (formerly of NVIDIA), has updated their website with information about their new real-time global illumination SDK called Radium. You’ll remember Fantasy Lab as the company that released the Rhinork GI demo and announced the game Danger Planet (covered here). The description boasts infinite bounces of light. Assuming that they are using the same disc-based transfer approached used in Bunnell’s GPU Gems 2 article (also check out the recent Pixar paper Point-Based Approximate Color Bleeding), I think this means that any number of bounces can be calculated as each bounce is an iteration in that algorithm. I’d definitely like to hear more details but I suppose that is unlikely to happen as they are trying to make a living

The group I work in at AMD is involved in a few presentations at SIGGRAPH this year. First, Chris Oat and Natalya Tatarchuk will be presenting a talk in the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games course on Monday on our latest demo “Froblins”. This talk will cover using the GPU and DirectX 10.1 for scene management, occlusion culling, terrain tessellation, approximations to global illumination, character tessellation, and crowd simulation.

I will be presenting a shorter talk on Thursday from 4:15-4:45 in the Beyond Programmable Shading: In Action course, focusing on how we used the GPU to do some general computing in the Froblins demo to allow our Froblin characters to navigate around the world and avoid each other. My addition to this course was a bit on short notice so I am fairly nervous, but how could I pass up an opportunity to speak at SIGGRAPH? I must say I am very jealous of my co-workers who will be done with all presenting duties on the first day of the conference!

I am always eager to meet new people so please feel free to introduce yourself if you will be in attendance!

Update: Here’s the link to the chapter from the course notes on our Froblins demo: March of the Froblins: Simulation and Rendering Massive Crowds of Intelligent and Detailed Creatures on GPU

NVIDIA posted Ignacio Castaño’s DX11 tessellation talk from GameFest. Though DX11 doesn’t seem to be as much of a forward leap as DX10 was, tessellation and compute shaders are certainly significant additions to the API.  Castaño discusses an implementation of Loop and Schaefer’s approximation to Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces as described in “Approximating Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces with Bicubic Patches“. He additionally describes using displacement mapping with vector displacements and discusses techniques for sampling the displacement map that ensure a watertight mesh.

Tessellation of Displaced Subdivision Surfaces in DX11

Humus recently posted a new demo. He renders the interior of rooms visible from the exterior using cube maps. This eliminates the need for additional geometry to represent the interior. With D3D10.1, cube map arrays are used. This allows different cube maps to be selected dynamically in the shader to add variety to the rooms rendered.

It seems to me that you could additionally transform the vector used to fetch from the cubemaps to provide a random rotation around the vertical axis to provide further variation between rooms.

Amidst a flurry of articles from technical websites, Intel also released the paper (non-ACM link) on the Larrabee architecture that will be presented at SIGGRAPH next week.

Articles discussing some details that were released in a presentation by Larry Siler:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=602

http://techgage.com/article/intel_opens_up_about_larrabee

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=14757

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3367