Gadgetory

hey Ron we are at ECG C 2016 and we just took a look at some of the Paragon rendering techniques that Epic Games is applying through Unreal Engine and this would be specifically for the character Sparrow in Paragon and so we have some stills that we took from this talk I'm just gonna compress it a little bit because there's interesting information in terms of graphics technology GP rendering pipeline stuff like that one of the main things we talked about in this demonstration Zak parish presented he was talking about the way hair works within Unreal Engine and specifically for Sparrow in Paragon and one of those items is of course lighting lighting sort of does everything in games these days that looks amazing without investing too much in geometry and things that could slow down the processing on your GPU side and looking at lighting specifically that engine uses a deferred rendering pipeline so the engine compiles all these materials that are needed for the whatever's being drawn on the screen it compiles all those materials and ships that to the GPU the GPU then creates an image out of that so a couple interesting notes here the light enters the hair and there's all these anisotropic filtering and different shading techniques that you've seen in your game settings so AO is one of those AF is one of those and then there's also specular items that we see appearing as well so with specular there's this sort of highlight effect on the hair and the light hits the hair and it creates this almost beam of highlight across the surface of it and the way this looks is changed based upon the roughness factor that is entered into the engine by the game's developers so there's a roughness of materials and with hair they generally increase the roughness if you decrease it make it more smooth then it will actually sort of almost look like a mineral oil effect was applied to the hair that's not too realistic so this is a rougher surface material and that means that the specular reflection doesn't go quite as far as it might with a smooth surface so that is one of the things that we looked at with hair with Zack parish's presentation another item was skin and this one we're more familiar with on the editorial side because we've worked with nvidia and AMD talking out this specific element within game graphics and that is subsurface scattering so subscript service scattering is the effect where light hits skin and then enters and bounces around within the skin because skin is not perfectly opaque as it may sort of appear at a top level underneath there's cells there's blood vessels all these things and light interacts with those and that changes the color of the skin it changes the way that the light is perceived by the user within games the subsurface scattering effect is somewhat limited right now because it has to be done in screen space that means the only items that you can currently see are affected by subsurface scattering and the the issue there is that if you start applying it globally then it's just it's too abusive on the video card so subsurface scattering very cool stuff you can track previous articles we've written with nvidia and AMD on that but the top level here is just that the scatter radius can be changed with an unreal engine to modify how far the light scatters how much the character looks like he or she is glowing when that light hits the skin and interacts with it and bounces around under the surface and then for more information on these technologies and the other technologies discussed in the rendering pipeline during the demo here at ECG see hit the link in the description below we've got an article that covers the talk with a couple of photos if you're interested in how it all works so as always thank you for watching patreon link the postal video and leave comments if you have any questions we'll see you all next time