Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 160 — December 6, 2020


Black skin in your stylized dimly-lit video game

  • The article presents how important reflectivity of Black skin is for believable results
  • it shows how to adjust textures and the Unity PBR shaders (specular workflow) to decouple specular color from the glossiness


Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering

  • the talk from Digital Dragons looks at open questions in rendering
  • walkthrough of the various assumptions and approximations and raises the question of the most significant source of error in modern rendering pipeline?
  • presenting a look at the higher-level view at how are rendering and production pipeline might evolve
  • discussing tradeoffs and how a more holistic view of rendering might lead to more productivity and better results


Angelo Pesce - Rendering the Metaverse across Space and Time

  • the talk provides an overview of Roblox and how the philosophy creates an environment with very different technical challenges
  • a tech that favors scalable over optimal and how it’s been able to evolve existing data to take advantage of new device abilities
  • provides an overview of the engine architecture and a walkthrough of a large number of rendering systems (clustering, lighting, shading)


Particles Color and Depth Textures

  • part of tutorial series about the Unity scriptable rendering pipeline (SRP)
  • covers how to support soft and distortion particles
  • determining depth for orthographic and perspective projections


Robin Taillandier & Jon Valdes - Every Strand Counts: Physics and Rendering Behind Frostbite’s Hair

  • presentation shows the in-progress state of the new Frostbite hair rendering system in the context of FIFA
  • covering both the strand simulation and rendering
  • rendering is done using a custom line rasterize, order-independent transparency, and strand space shading (texture space shading)


The Spraycan

  • the articles discusses how the voxel rendering in teardown uses an 8-bit color palette for voxel materials and still allows coloring
  • this is archived by precalculating multiple color variations for each material
  • if not enough slots are available similar materials will be merged


Linearly Transformed Spherical Harmonics

  • the Bachelor thesis introduces Linearly Transformed Spherical Harmonics
  • A technique for computing specular shading from to polygonal area lights
  • compares the method against linearly transformed cosines, and it’s able to produce higher quality results


Memory types of discrete GPUs

  • the article explains a different kind of memory that exists
  • how AMDs Smart Access Memory fits into the picture
  • additionally covers considering of performance when using a device or host-local memory


Intel View in Mafia III

  • the article presents how the effect was implemented that allows objects to be colorized/silhouetted to make them pop out of the scene
  • this is implemented by rendering AABB with per-object depth into a separate render target, marking tagged objects via stencil
  • and using post-processing to apply the outline effect


Michał Olejnik - Raytraced Shadows in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

  • video recording of the talk covered in week 154
  • the presentation explains how the raytracing for shadows has been implemented into Call of Duty
  • covering acceleration structure separation, performance, denoising implementation, and supporting multiple local area lights


Thanks to Peter Kohaut for support of this series.


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