Gadgetory

all right so um objects some of you may have heard of optics before it's an SDK for building primarily rendering engines that do ray tracing it can be used for a wide variety of things it can be used for building ray tracers to do any inclusion to bake in the light Maps for games it can be used for real time ray tracing you might have seen our design garage down low and there's a bunch of folks that are building real time great tracers out of optics the highest performance rate racers on the planet in fact are built on optics on NVIDIA GPUs it can be used to do high quality rendering of procedural services the folks at CCP in fact for Yvonne I use optics to do character portraits for the game all using optics and something you might not have known is that optics is used actually as part of a lot of game developers core pipeline it can it's it can interact with and play with and it can be built used to be a building block to help produce great games so the folks at Bungie that you might have heard of these guys they're working on a little game called destiny which you might have heard of they're in fact using objects to author content for destiny they're building ambience curious that's kind of a form of ampule occlusion basically doing global illumination pre calculation for destiny using optics on NVIDIA GPU farms you know you've probably heard Nvidia say that you know lots of game developers use NVIDIA GPUs but you might not know that they use NVIDIA GPUs in ways you might not have thought about they don't just use them to as a game engine development they use them as actually cool or authoring for their game itself so there's a GPU farm at Bungie it's cranking away calculating a mean experience you can compute a o on a really complex team in a little bit over a minute on this GPU farm orders of magnitude faster than the alternatives they bake it up for you to run time so you can have a simulator île time global illumination in destiny and the the fact that they can do this on NVIDIA kind of just as a testament affect the strength of that core technology that value that that we're bringing to the game developer industry they're taking some more technology they're building tools themselves Bill Turner technology could solve really important problems it's pretty cool stuff so we're really excited to be working with the buncha guys my destiny and they by the way this if you're curious about this for tips no technique this was presented at SIGGRAPH Asia by Peter Pike Sloane and a crew from Bungie it's a pretty interesting technique on top of objects pretty cool stuff so one other pennant technique that we use is a frame for a min clusion is called Verizon based I am a loser H Bao what this is is a technique for doing a real-time detailed shadows as a form of ambient occlusion it's been ingrid in a huge number of games it's a highly optimized library for doing a o it scales across a wide range of GPUs it runs on a PDA around an AMD and it's kind of a fundamental building block for doing lighting in games it's been intimate integrated into a bunch of games that you can kind of see up here so let's go ahead and see kind of kind of a before-and-after here so this is a traditional kind of scene that you might see this is kind of a called old school immune occlusion the challenge here of course is that particularly in the car you're not getting a lot of the soft edges that you might get and real life with it with a higher quality Hale solution so with Verizon base and inclusion you get much more of that soft effect so if in particular if you look underneath the car kind of the old-school effect tends to produce these hard edges and in fact an occlusion in real time is a call it an approximation of of a true kind of full-on path trade solution and so it's not it's not going to be as accurate as a fully baked solution but it's because it's done in real time it can interact and characters can have it and that nothing so in this case it's a car so if you look at the wheels you get it you get a little shadow bleeding onto the tire and with the immune occlusion you get kind of that soft that soft feel around it which is you know typically what a diffuse shadow would have so that's one of our kind of cool technology so let's take a look at what this can do in real time oh you've got no party so Jim if you want to talk to me here but what we have here is is a tool we have that basically allows you to visualize the effects of the HBO library on a variety of game scenes from a gift oh this is a scene actually from Splinter Cell blacklist and and the mode we've just started this often is kind of the traditional SSAO mode which which and basically what happens when they go is that you you do a search around the pixel that you're currently looking at and try to look for the include errs that are nearby and in the larger the search area the more complex the algorithm is and the more difficult it is to compute real time and so what you end up getting is Tony showed in the previous slides you don't get a lot of the you know the things that are further away or larger excluders like the bottom of this car don't actually produce shadows right so what we can do and with each video is you can actually increase what Scovel were calling the radius multiplier here or the radius of the search space patients basically and get a lot of interesting ayo effects to capture these larger further away occluders and we also have a number of tweaks that artists and designers can play with in designing the parameters for our AO library for example the detail AO level where you can achieve see jacked this up you get a lot of fine details like the door handles and things like that or feeling for a more coarse solution because say some other shadow technology inside your game handles the details you can even dial this down and have it would just handle the course the course areas so it's very flexible it's very fast it's fast on on all GPUs and it allows you to have really high quality results as we see here so one of the other really cool things about not just the technology but kind of the way we work with developers we build tools that let developers play so this particular tool we can just grab a trace from their game they don't have to go and integrate a bunch of one other kind of technique that we've been working on of course is contact hardening shadows if you're not familiar with what this means in the real world when you have an occluder and a light source the shadow that gets cast typically is hard-edged near the base of the object and as the shadow gets away from the object it gets to be more diffused or soft edged that's typically called hardik shadow so we have a PCS s illumination that we've been working with on a variety of games this is it provides a lot of that kind a next level of shadow detail particularly for direct light sources on you know things like trees or chairs and so you can kind of see it here as it's close the edge is hard as it gets off to kind of push this out blur is out same thing with the the chair there you get the the pole and I don't have a laser pointer but I like right here it's soft and right there it gets hard these are these are techniques that we've developed they're delivered in a form to a developer that they could just easily integrate them they can try them out if it's going to work for their game and they have the extra benefit as as Jim mentioned as they are the highest performance implementation so just a little example of that if you take P CSS or HBO not only are they the highest quality implementations but there are the fastest implementation so that are the fastest not only on Nvidia but we actually improve the performance of the alternative implementations even on AMD this is the kind of thing that game developers love because in the end they just want their game to be great right and if you give them a highest quality solution that improves their frame rate it means the game can run on a wider range of hardware which is just good or they have more time or more CPU or GPU cycles to put more effects in the game to make the game look great so these are just nothing but win-win for everybody great visuals great performance on everyone any questions on that ok ok so the visual effects SDK so I kind of alluded to this a little bit before this is our library that kind of embodies a really complex visit visual effects these tend to combine simulations and rendering animation and simulation and rendering oftentimes they involve non-traditional rendering techniques things like voxels or Ray marching or ray tracing much more complicated implementations we build these as kind of turnkey solutions to solve those problems for developers so they don't have to do all that research and because we have the guys who are really the experts on how to do super fast cheap you implementations we're able to kind of extract the absolute best formitz out of some of these cutting-edge techniques that really other people can't afford to invest that time in I think most game developers would rather spend their time making a great looking game and making a great game they're trying to solve you know parallelism and register pressure and capsizes and all the super low-level needy gritty some dude but I think most just prefer the the kind of convenience of taking a great effect and integrating it right in during these rural games is directly meeting a light source that's light on the object and a lumen that illuminates that object but the light classically doesn't bounce the way that developer typically solves for that is they bake they pre calculate cool of illumination either using optics or other techniques and they make it into the textures or the shaders the environment so that you have a an effective global illumination that disadvantage to a technique like that is that it isn't dynamic so when the world changes or when you destroy something or your nano light source it's often difficult or impossible to have the updates to that indirect lighting happen so we've been working really hard on developing our super high performance library that allows real-time global illumination the other benefit of real-time GI is that if you build your game around real time global illumination your artists don't have to spend so much time cheating one of the big panes of game development is lighting and you have to you know be quite a sophisticated artist to get really good looking GI global illumination effects without actually really having global illumination so that plays hundreds or thousands of Lights in their scene because the lights don't bounce and so you have to do stuff like that whereas if you could implement GI in real time it would just do the right thing like with balance you get the indirect light you get the color bleeding so what we built is a scalable architecture that enables that and it's super high performance so let's take a look at what GI works to do okay so this what we're starting with here is direct lighting in this scene only so direct lighting we have two lights in the scene there's one up here and one down here this blue one and and basically every all the lighting that happens outside of these two cones is just a flat ambient right so you can see it's very flat over here you don't see any detail these artisans and in these hallways so let's go into the the direct lighting plus indirect lighting now which is these lights were already there in the scene but you didn't see them because there was no balance is happening it's coming explained so now what you have is there's the let's flip back and forth to give you a good idea here these arches are a great example right there's no light falling on these arches directly from the light sources so what you need is indirect lighting which is light that bounces off of a surface and then lights another surface to get light to go into these areas and there's a number of really interesting effects that are that are enabled by this one is this is a completely real-time effect you actually get real-time specular or glossy reflections which are entirely indirectly lit right this is just light that's falling on this surface from this emitter that's on these emitters that are on these little TVs in the hallway and and as the in specular is notoriously hard because it's inherently dynamic right because is dependent on the viewer it changes based on where how your viewing angle changed so you see that the specular is done entirely correctly other things we can do here is that we can add area light sources so these little these boxes that these Dino these Dino bones are in are actually area light sources and so looking at this Triceratops here you can see that there's a really really high-quality ambient occlusion type of fact and this is a notoriously difficult sort of shape to get real ambient occlusion on using screen space techniques you can see here that you have a really great ambient occlusion all source in real time from this area light source another thing you can do we can actually move these lights around so this is an lower-left what you're gonna see is basically the view from the lights perspective you can move move this light or you can move this other light as well which is the blue light here and one thing you'll get as you as you move around this light you see the cone of influence basically the white ass but even things outside of this cone of influence like look at this archway back here get closer so you guys get a good look here if you look at this archway there's actually the big sense of light ends right right at this boundary of the spotlight right so if I move this light you can see that the lighting is changing inside of that arch even though no direct light is falling on top on that surface so it's entirely because of the balance that happens off of the floor the light bounces off the floor and hits the arch and and adds light there so yeah that's that's illumination even up there first I can kill mine so GI works is is it is a GI library that we're working on you'll start to see this integrated begins I think probably next year the advantage of this is its implanting a bunch of incredibly complex volume based lighting techniques to simulate all of this bouncing of light that is necessary for the indirect lighting effect and it's fast you can be possible to implement this and on a GPU it runs cross-platform the nice thing about is that it's even possible to author your game entirely with an indirect lighting approach which could which could be quite a breakthrough for the game development community so they wouldn't necessarily have to be placing hundreds or thousands of lights to fake all these indirect lights he gets really nice effects on it as Jim mentioned you get the bounces you get the specularity to get really accurate reflections you get kind of a built-in ambient occlusion kind of all just kind of falls out it's one of the beautiful things and I think it's not I don't know if it's a theme but you know we talked about a unified physics simulation where the the simulations can play with each other nicely one of the nice things about global illumination is it's it's a more elegant solution and then it solves a bunch of the fundamental problems of lighting and shadow they all just kind of fall out of it it's computationally really complex the algorithms are really complex but the results are visually great and it solves a bunch of those fundamental problems and that's what we're really about you know kind of pushing in the state of the art visually and if we can not only make the result more beautiful make the game developers lives easier and better that's some so that's GI works that's one of the other technologies that we're announcing so one of the other classically really difficult problems in gaming has been really it has been nice fire and smoke classically this is done usually with alcohol at texture tricks it can be done with sprites and billboards it can be done with a bunch of alpha blended quads there's lots of ways to do this kinds of thing but the challenge with pretty much all of the existing approaches is that they tend to not really be correct from a volume perspective and again it's one of those things they don't really there's always a side effect those things either there's you know a lot of overdraw which is really performance expensive or there's you got blending and sorting introduced or things like that so we've worked on a solution we call flame works what this is is a volumetric effect engine that allows for things like smoke and fire to bits some say the same way they do it in film except it's ultra high performance it can be done in real time it supports shadowing you can emit light and it uses a multi grid volume based solver to read some really stunning effects so flame works is kind of one of that third I say I alluded to three technologies there's flex there's GI works and there's flame works so let's go ahead and kind of take a look at what flame works can do and yet remember this is all kind of running in real time and it's kind of one of those volume based effects that solve some really complex problems so what Jeb's showing here is it is actually a true volume there's no sprites there's no layered quads there's no sneaky particle it's a it's a true volume based solution it's emitting light as you can see it's human love it interacts with geometry with imaginative simulation so the fire we're gonna flows around the sphere it kind of behaves the way you think of behaves in the same technique that they use in the film in shape we're doing things like smoke and fire I can't wait I think you'll see flame works integrated innoGames starting next year as well in fact we've already started integrating this into core engines that's just I don't know that's cool