Render Testing

Building up the scene for the 5 second advertisement has been full of small struggles and issues, from things rendering slow or incorrectly to overblown light.

I want to add dust particles and a shock wave, but I'm trying to figure out how best to go about it, then onto render passes.

Facial Animation in Star Citizen

Video demonstration of Star Citizen's Facial system

A small update to the game "Star Citizen" running on CryEngine, this video looks at techniques applied to create a real-time virtual character believable, from blend shapes to bones and rigs, to blood maps and wrinkle maps. Multiple techniques are shown and actively demonstrate how important the sum of the parts are when creating realistic characters.

                         Here is the final real-time result. Impressive work

Modern day animation in games

Here is an interesting look at animation on a modern gaming engine, in this case Square Enix's Luminous Engine. It demonstrates some of the techniques involved to blend and collide animations to great effect. Seeing what goes on under the hood of a real time gaming engine and how it handles variables will give you an idea of just how much work can go into modern games.

Pack shot for advertising

An upcoming project is to design a 5 second advertising short of a product of my choice. I have chosen to create my own imaginary product to sell.

5 Second Short documentation

Spare Voxel Octree Global Illumination

Not too long ago, John Carmack of Id software ( now Occulus ) stated that sparse voxel octrees were the start of the future of real time graphics. Years later and this technology is finally coming to fruition, albeit currently in the form of lighting rather than being used directly on models. Sparse voxel octree global illumination as shown in this video demonstrates the incredible potential of this technology in real time applications. This will allow a significant bump in lighting quality, accuracy, lighting grades, shadow quality and light reflection/refraction. Potentially this will allow all light sources to always cast bounced light on the correct surfaces. 

The above picture also demonstrates the use of SVOGI very well, showing that light bounces are much more natural than the usual static or baked lighting that usually gets used in most real time applications.

Here is the same scene lit with previous lighting models. As you can see it appears far less natural than the SVOGI image, failing to capture how light bounces, scatters and bleeds into shadow.

Here is some documentation provided by Crytek on SVOGI

SVOGI Lighting for real time application.

LODs and texture budget.

When rendering assets in real time for a game engine, there are a number of factors that have to be taken into consideration.

- Polygon budget
- Texture budget
- Texture size and usage

Since texture and polygon counts are finite in comparison to real time rendering, it is necessary for there to be budgets to work with. Say for instance you are working on a game and the texture memory budget is between 512-1024mb. This kind of budget can be filled quickly by textures and as a result texture swapping and level of detail (LOD for short) can be implemented to tackle the issue.

Essentially what LOD does is reduce the detail of objects and textures at a distance. Objects that are closer will have full detail, whereas objects at a distance will have reduced polygon counts and texture sizes. A model may have 3-5k polygons up close, but at a longer distance (50-100 meters) this may be reduced down to 500 polygons as there is no need for such detail. Even the texture, say 2048x2048 might be reduced down to 256x256 as there is no need to see full detailed textures at this distance. In a good engine, the game will hide the distance in which models are swapped from the high and lows. Sometimes there can be multiple distances and multiple levels of detail. In some cases 3d models may be swapped for basic image planes or 2d sprites at a long distance (Often used for trees) to allow more objects on screen with a lower memory footprint.

A good example of an engine that handles LODs well is CryEngine. The model at the front has the highest poly count and the model further back has a reduced texture quality and poly count with very little loss of detail.

Star Wars oh yes.

Star Wars 360 degree interactive video

Interactive CG sequence for the upcoming Star Wars film. Very cool stuff.