Advances in real-time graphics research and the ever-increasing power of mainstream GPUs and consoles continue to generate an explosion of innovative algorithms suitable for fast, interactive rendering of complex and engaging virtual worlds. Every year, the latest video games employ a vast variety of sophisticated algorithms to produce ground-breaking 3D rendering that pushs the visual boundaries and interactive experience of rich environments.

This course is the next installment in the established series of SIGGRAPH courses on real-time rendering. It summarizes the best graphics practices and research from the game-development community and provides practical and production-proven algorithms. The first part of the course includes speakers from the makers of several award-winning games, such as Bungie, Media Molecule, Crytek, and Avalanche. Topics include practical methods of real game-rendering pipelines, deferred rendering improvements, complex lighting techniques, scene voxelization and participating media, and other exciting production secrets. The focus is on the intersection between the game-development community and state-of-the-art 3D graphics research, and the potential for cross-pollination of knowledge in future games and other interactive applications.

COURSE SCHEDULE

9 am
Introduction
Tatarchuk

9:05 am
Making Game Worlds From Polygon Soup: Visibility, Spatial Hierarchy and Rendering Challenges
Chen, Silvennoinen, and Tatarchuk

9:45 am
Rendering in Cars 2
C. Hall, R. Hall, D. Edwards

10:30 am
Two Uses of Voxels in LittleBigPlanet2’s Graphics Engine
Evans & Kirczenow

11:15 am
Secrets of CryENGINE 3 Graphics Technology
Sousa, Kasyan, and Schulz

"Rango" presented many challenges: the number of characters and their realism, complexity, and unique stylized look had probably never been achieved before in an animated feature. This talk provides a broad overview of the workflow and tools that were used for rigging and animating the characters.

This session gives attendees all the tools they need to move their real-time art from their 3D app of choice into Unity and deploy it to a web browser, mobile, device, or stand-alone device in simple, artist-friendly steps. No programming knowledge required.

Cory Doctorow is a contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Wired, and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. He was formerly director of European affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards, and treaties. He is a visiting senior lecturer at Open University (UK) and previously served as the Fulbright chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

In 2008, his novel, Little Brother, was a New York Times best seller. Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays called Content: Selected Essays in Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. Doctorow’s latest works include an adult novel, Maker, published by Tor Books/HarperCollins UK; For the Win, a young adult book about video games, labor politics, and economics; and a short story collection entitled Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.

He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and British Science Fiction Awards. He co-founded the open-source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, which was sold to OpenText, Inc. in 2003. He serves on the boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc., the Organization for Transformative Works, Areae, the Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, and Onion Networks, Inc.

Photo: Jonathan Worth

Did you ever dream of showing your fashion design on a body of your own creation on the fashion runway? In this workshop, attendees learn how to use the Digital Clothing Suite's human character and pattern data to seam patterns, simulate garment draping, apply and manipulate images to generate their own textile designs, and save the final result into an animation clip. The clips are shown in The Studio, where attendees vote on their favorite designs. The best designer receives a six-month free trial of the Digital Clothing Suite.

Members of the Art Galley committee offer 30-minute guided tours to introduce visitors to Tracing Home and some of the specific artworks displayed in the exhibition. The daily tours begin in the Art Gallery.

This talk explains how Blue Sky Studios created iterative, procedurally arranged tile mosaics in the sidewalks and streets of Rio de Janeiro. The was designed to be highly directable. It had to be automated yet nimble enough to achieve evolving production goals.

This algorithm can automatically convert normal map to displacement map to reduce the cost of creating tessellated 3D game assets.

Originally invented for offline rendering, this technique for rendering per-face texture-mapping datasets in real-time on commodity Direct3D 11 hardware eliminates the texture-unwrap step of the art creation process while producing an image that avoids texture discontinuities frequently found in models.

Building upon previous work on dual quaternion skinning, and with the introduction of a new way to represent tangent frames (QTangent), this talk presents improvements to quality, performance, and memory footprint of skinned geometry achieved during development of the Crysis franchise.