Yearly Archives: 2011

SIGGRAPH 2011 Courses – Part 1

At 18 courses, the SIGGRAPH 2011 course program is smaller than it has been in previous years, but what it lacks in size it more than makes up in quality. I’ll go over the list with a focus on courses of interest to game developers and/or real-time rendering researchers. If you are going to be attending SIGGRAPH, this should help you decide which courses to attend – if not, you’ll at least know which course notes and Encore videos to hunt down after the conference. Since this post is turning out to be quite long, I’ll split it up into several parts, spread out over the next few days.

UPDATES:

  • 6/20/2011: Added details to Beyond Programmable Shading regarding Peter-Pike Sloan’s talk and the Software Rasterization on GPUs talk, as well as correcting the titles of several of the speakers.
  • 6/21/2011: Added links to the papers High-Performance Software Rasterization on GPUs and VoxelPipe: A Programmable Pipeline for 3D Voxelization (the second link is the paper webpage – no PDF yet).
  • 6/24/2011: Removed an incorrect detail about the DEAA technique.
  • 7/10/2011: Updated the description of the Battlefield 3 / Need for Speed: The Run talk in the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course.

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games (Part I & Part II)

Since 2006, this course series (organized by Natalya Tatarchuk, formerly at AMD and now at Bungie) has been my favorite thing to see at SIGGRAPH. Each year it has showcased new content from the cutting edge of game and IHV graphics development. Since Natalya joined Bungie, the emphasis has been less on IHV demos and more on games, which in my opinion makes the course even better – this year looks like the best yet! Part I starts with a  brief introduction by Natalya and continues with four talks, each between 45 and 60 minutes in length:

  • Bungie’s Graphics Secret Sauce, by Natalya Tatarchuk (Senior Graphics Researcher, Bungie) and Hao Chen (Engineering Lead, Bungie): Bungie’s talk will cover the graphics techniques developed for the award-winning game Halo: Reach,  along with some new research undertaken for Bungie’s next title.
  • Rendering in Cars 2, by Christopher Hall, Robert Hall, and David Edwards (Programmers at Avalanche Software): this talk will describe rendering techniques used in Cars 2: The Video Game, including offloading of post-processing and stereoscopy computations onto the Playstation 3’s SPUs. Other topics covered will include new developments in color precision, post processing effects, shadows, and the use of light probes.
  • Secrets of CryENGINE 3 Graphics Technology, by Tiago Sousa (Principal R&D Graphics Engineer, Crytek), Nickolay Kasyan (Senior Rendering Engineer, Crytek), and Nicolas Schulz (Graphics Engineer, Crytek): an overview of the novel deferred lighting approach used in CryENGINE 3, along with an in-depth description of optimization techniques (both general and platform-specific), as well as stereoscopic 3D rendering and shadowing techniques.
  • Two Uses of Voxels in LittleBigPlanet2’s Graphics Engine Alex Evans (CTO & Co-Founder, Media Molecule) and Anton Kirczenow (Senior Programmer, Media Molecule): this talk will describe a PlayStation 3-centric implementation of real-time dynamic scene voxelization and demonstrate two ways this voxel representation was used for rendering and special effects in the game LittleBigPlanet 2.

Part II also starts with a short introduction by Natalya; this is followed by five 30-50 minute talks:

  • More Performance! Five Rendering Ideas from Battlefield 3 and Need For Speed: The Run, by John White (Senior Rendering Engineer, NFS) and Colin Barré-Brisebois (Rendering Engineer, BF3): this talk will cover several techniques from Battlefield 3 and Need for Speed: The Run designed to increase performance without sacrificing visual quality. These will include chroma sub-sampling for faster full-screen effects, a novel DirectX 9+ scatter-gather approach to bokeh rendering, improved temporally-stable dynamic ambient occlusion, HiZ reverse-reload for faster shadow and tile-based deferred shading on Xbox 360 (the last topic is a good complement to Christina Coffin’s GDC 2011 presentation giving Playstation 3 implementation details).
  • Physically-based Lighting in Call of Duty: Black Ops, by Dimitar Lazarov (Lead Graphics Engineer, Treyarch): Dimitar will give an overview of the lighting architecture used in the Call of Duty games to achieve competitive visual quality at 60 frames per second. He will then describe the process of introducing a physically-based lighting model to the series in Call of Duty: Black Ops, from the premise behind the model to the specific benefits and issues encountered when integrating it into the game.
  • Real-time Image Quilting: Arbitrary Material Blends, Invisible Seams, and No Repeats, by Hugh Malan (Graphics Programmer, CCP Games): A pixel shader-based image quilting technique which handles situations where standard environment texturing has problems: transitions between arbitrary neighbor materials, localized texture features due to custom geometry, and geometry-dependent edge effects. Production details such as vertex sharing and compaction techniques, texture storage options, and implementation issues for PC and console will also be covered.
  • Dynamic Lighting in God of War III, by Vassily Filippov (Lead Game Programmer, SCEA Santa Monica): this talk will cover a novel forward lighting approach used in God of War III to create rich dynamically lit environments with dozens of light sources applied to a single pixel. The description will include a complete mathematical explanation of the algorithm, as well as implementation details such as the combination of multiple lights into a single aggregate light per vertex on the Playstation 3’s SPUs, a new light interpolation approach which improved lighting accuracy, and the application of the aggregate lights per pixel on the GPU. Usability constraints, edge cases and ways to reduce artifacts will be covered in detail.
  • Pre-Integrated Skin Shading, by Eric Penner (Rendering Engineer, Electronic Arts Vancouver): Eric will describe a technique for rendering realistic skin in games, where rather than gathering neighboring light to simulate subsurface scattering, the effects of scattered light are pre-integrated. This allows for achieving the non-local effects of subsurface scattering using only locally stored information and a custom shading model.

Filtering Approaches for Real-Time Anti-Aliasing

From a theoretical standpoint, performing anti-aliasing as a post-process is locking the barn door after the horses have bolted. However, such techniques have recently proven to be surprisingly effective in practice – a flurry of algorithms, implementations, and variants have created one of the most important real-time rendering trends. For this course, the organizers – Jorge Jimenez (Real-Time Graphics Researcher, University of Zaragoza) and Diego Gutierrez (Associate Professor, University of Zaragoza) – have tracked down the inventors of pretty much every important technique in this area and recruited them to present their work:

  • Morphological Antialiasing (MLAA), presented by Alexander Reshetov (Senior Staff Researcher, Intel) – this technique was presented as a paper at the High Performance Graphics (HPG) conference in 2009; the impressive results shown sparked most of the current interest in this general approach.
  • A Directionally Adaptive Edge Anti-Aliasing Filter, presented by Jason Yang (Principal Member of Technical Staff , AMD). This technique was also presented as a HPG 2009 paper, and was influential as well.
  • A GPU-friendly variant of MLAA, presented by Jorge Jimenez (Real-Time Graphics Researcher, University of Zaragoza). This variant was published in the book GPU Pro 2; the talk will also cover recent developments not included in the book.
  • A hybrid CPU/GPU MLAA variant implemented for Costume Quest on the XBox 360,  presented by Pete Demoreuille (Lead Programmer, Double Fine).
  • The Playstation 3/SPU MLAA implementation first used in God of War III and subsequently made available to all Playstation 3 developers as part of the EDGE library. Tobias Berghoff (Senior Programmer, SCEE) will detail the implementation (including recent improvements), and Cedric Perthuis (Senior Staff Graphics Engineer, SCEA Santa Monica) will talk about how the technique was integrated into the God of War III engine.
  • The SPU-based Anti-Aliasing technique (SPUAA) used on the Playstation 3 version of The Saboteur, presented by Henry Yu (Founder and CEO, Kalloc Studios). This technique has long been a topic of speculation among game developers, and will be discussed here for the first time.
  • Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing (SRAA), presented by Morgan McGuire (Assistant Professor, Williams College and Visiting Scientist, NVIDIA). This technique was presented as a paper in the 2011 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D).
  • Fast approXimate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA), presented by Timothy Lottes (Developer Technology, NVIDIA). Fast and effective, this technique is currently being evaluated by many developers for inclusion in their games.
  • Distance-to-Edge Anti-Aliasing (DEAA), presented by Hugh Malan (Graphics Programmer, CCP Games – formerly at Realtime Worlds).
  • Geometry Buffer Anti-Aliasing (GBAA), presented by Emil Persson (also known as “Humus” – Graphics Programmer, Avalanche Studios).
  • The Directionally Localized Anti-Aliasing (DLAA) technique used in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, presented by Dmitry Andreev (Senior Rendering Engineer, Visceral Games – formerly at LucasArts).
  • The temporal filtering anti-aliasing technique used in Crysis 2, presented by Tiago Sousa (Principal R&D Graphics Engineer, Crytek).

Beyond Programmable Shading (Part I & Part II)

Similarly to the “Advances in Real-Time Rendering” course, “Beyond Programmable Shading” is an “ensemble” course which has been presented annually at SIGGRAPH for several years running. As its name reflects, it deals with GPU-based graphics that go beyond the traditional graphics pipeline. This course has had uniformly high quality each year, and 2011 appears to be no exception. Part I starts with a 20-minute introduction by the course organizers – Aaron Lefohn (Lead Research Scientist, Intel) and Mike Houston (Fellow, AMD) – and continues with six 25-30 minute talks:

  • Peter-Pike Sloan (Research & Development Lead, Disney Interactive Studios) will give a talk (title to be determined) about the applicability of current graphics research to games, discussing examples of research that works in games today, as well as research that does not work  – and why.
  • GPU Architecture, by Mike Houston (Fellow, AMD): an overview talk covering GPU architecture – unlike similar talks in previous iterations of the course, the architecture talk is extended this year to include heterogeneous architectures.
  • Scheduling the Graphics Pipeline, by Jonathan Ragan-Kelley (PhD Student, MIT): this is an extension of a talk given by Jonathan in last year’s course – it will include significant new material, including more specifics on how scheduling works in particular GPU architectures.
  • Parallel Programming for Real-Time Graphics, by Aaron Lefohn (Lead Research Scientist, Intel): compared to the talk of the same name in last year’s course, this talk will be significantly re-written and updated, including an increase in the number of concrete examples.
  • Software Rasterization on GPUs, by Samuli Laine (Senior Research Scientist, NVIDIA) and Jacopo Pantaleoni (Senior Architect, NVIDIA): software rasterization on GPUs can be an effective way to bypass the limitations of the GPU’s fixed-function rasterizer. Each of the speakers will be discussing papers they will publish at HPG 2011 – in Samuli’s case, High-Performance Software Rasterization on GPUs and in Jacopo’s case, VoxelPipe: A Programmable Pipeline for 3D Voxelization.
  • The course organizers are still in the process of finalizing the topic and speaker of the last talk.

Part II starts with a brief welcome and re-introduction by Mike Houston. This is followed by four 30-40 minute talks, all new to this course series:

  • Toward a Blurry Rasterizer, by Jacob Munkberg (Research Scientist, Intel): this talk will cover the current state of the art in rasterizing triangles with motion and defocus blur – this is a very active area of research, which I suspect will yield some important GPU advances in the near future. Jacob has co-authored several important papers in this area – most notable are the Graphics Hardware 2007 paper Stochastic Rasterization using Time-Continuous Triangles and the HPG 2011 paper Hierarchical Stochastic Motion Blur Rasterization.
  • Order-Independent Transparency, by Marco Salvi (Research Scientist, Intel): similarly to the previous talk, this covers the current state of the art in an important topic on which the speaker has considerable expertise. Of Marco’s work on the topic, most notable is the HPG 2011 paper Adaptive Transparency (not yet available online but his GDC 2011 talk on the topic – including source code – is available).
  • Interactive Global Illumination, by Chris Wyman (Associate Professor, University of Iowa): this is the third “state-of-the-art talk” covering a relatively broad topic. Chris’ publications page includes numerous papers on this topic, some including source code.
  • User-Defined Pipelines for Ray Tracing, by Steven Parker (Director of High Performance Computing and Computational Graphics, NVIDIA): this is a more tightly focused talk than the previous three. It has the potential to be quite interesting, given the speaker’s central role in the development of the Optix ray tracing system (he was the first author on the SIGGRAPH 2010 paper) as well as his area of responsibility at NVIDIA.

The course closes with a 15-minute wrap-up talk by the organizers (on the topic “What’s Next for Interactive Rendering Research?”), followed by a 45-minute panel discussion between the various course speakers.

I’ll continue going over the remaining SIGGRAPH 2011 courses in my next few blog posts.

Hybrid CPU/GPU MLAA on the Xbox-360Pete Demoreuille

Quick SIGGRAPH Roundup

I’m planning a series of more extensive posts on SIGGRAPH content (starting with the courses), but I’ll start with a quick roundup to help people decide on their attendance before the early-bird registration expires at the end of this week. The roundup is focused on those sessions of potential interest to professional game artists, professional game programmers, real-time rendering researchers and real-time rendering students. I’m not listing paper sessions – I typically skip those in favor of other sessions since the papers themselves tend to be readily available. I’ve also skipped the Reception and the various Birds of a Feather sessions for brevity since those tend to be more social (some Birds of a Feather sessions do have presentations, and others might be of particular interest, so it’s probably a good idea to check the BoF list). More information can be found on the individual SIGGRAPH web pages (linked where available) as well as the SIGGRAPH Advance Program.

UPDATES:

  • June 15, 2011: Added SIGGRAPH Dailies! and relevant Exhibitor Tech Talks; added links to individual Panels.
  • June 20, 2011: Added links to individual CAF Production Sessions, The Studio Workshops, The Studio Digital Artistry Sessions, and the Keynote.
  • June 23, 2011: Added links to remaining sessions, and corrected the classification of some of The Studio presentations.
  • June 24, 2011: Removed Reception and Birds of a Feather sessions for brevity; also corrected times of some Studio Talks.
  • July 15, 2011: Added individual NVIDIA Exhibitor Tech Talks.

Multiple Days

  • Electronic Theater (6:00-8:00 on August 8, 9, and 10)
  • Emerging Technologies (2:00-5:30 on August 7; 9:00-5:30 on August 8, 9, and 10; 9:00-1:00 on August 11; also open during Reception)
  • Exhibition (9:30-6:00 on August 9 and 10; 9:30-3:30 on August 11)
  • Posters (12:00-5:30 on August 7; 9:00-5:30 on August 8, 9, 10, and 11)
  • Real-Time Live! (4:30-5:15 on August 8, 9, and 10)
  • The Sandbox (12:00-5:30 on August 7; 9:00-5:30 on August 8,9, and 10; 9:00-1:00 on August 11; also open during Reception)
  • There are also several co-located conferences which may be of interest

Sunday, August 7th

12:00-1:45:

12:30-1:45:

2:00-3:30:

2:00-5:15:

3:00-3:30:

3:45-4:15:

3:45-5:15:

4:30-5:00:

5:00–5:30:

6:00-8:00:

Monday, August 8th

9:00-9:30:

9:00-10:00:

9:00-10:30:

9:00-12:15:

9:30-10:30:

10:15-11:15:

10:40-12:10:

11:00-1:00:

11:30-12:30:

12:00-1:00:

12:45-1:30:

1:45-3:00:

2:00-2:30:

2:00-3:30:

2:00-5:15:

3:15-4:15:

3:45-4:15:

3:45-5:00:

3:45-5:15:

4:30-5:00:

4:30- 5:30:

5:00-5:30:

Tuesday, August 9th

9:00-9:30:

9:00-10:30:

9:00-12:15:

10:30-11:30:

10:40-12:15:

10:45-12:15:

12:30-1:45:

1:15-1:45:

2:00-3:30:

2:00-3:30:

2:00-5:15:

3:00-3:30:

3:45-4:15:

3:45-4:40:

3:45-5:00:

3:45-5:15:

4:30-5:00:

Wednesday, August 10th

9:00-9:30:

9:00-10:30:

9:00-12:15:

9:45-10:45:

10:30-11:30:

10:40-12:10:

10:45-12:15:

11:15-12:15:

11:30-12:00:

12:30-1:45:

2:00-3:30:

2:00-5:15:

2:15-3:15:

3:45-5:00:

3:45-5:15:

4:30-5:00:

  • The Visual Style of “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” (The Studio Talk)

6:00-7:30:

Thursday, August 11th

9:00-10:30:

9:00-12:15:

10:40-12:15:

10:45-12:15:

2:00-3:30:

2:00-5:15:

3:45–5:15:

How to make money with your GPU

You’ve probably heard about bitcoins by now, the currency of cryptoanarchist libertarian computer geeks or something. It turns out that GPUs are particularly good at mining bitcoins, compared to CPUs: check out this chart – the key factor is Mhash/sec (though Mhash/Joule is also an entertaining concept). The most interesting page (for me) at the site is their explanation of why a GPU is (so much) faster than a CPU for this task. Not a shocker for anyone reading this blog; we all know that GPGPU can rip through certain tasks at amazing speeds. What’s more interesting to me is how and why one IHV’s GPUs are considerably faster than the other’s. I won’t spoil the surprise here, see the page to learn more.

Loosening of ACM’s copyright policy

We’ve talked about this before, how ACM’s copyright policy stated that they, not you, control the copyright of any images you publish in their journals, proceedings, or other publications. For example, if your hometown newspaper wants to publish a story of “local boy makes good” and wish to include samples of your work, they needed to ask the ACM for permission (and pay the ACM $28 per image). Not a huge problem, but it’s a bureaucratic roadblock for a reasonable request. Researchers are usually surprised to hear they have lost this right.

While it was possible to be assertive and push to retain copyright to your images (or even article) and just grant ACM unlimited permission – certainly firms such as Pixar and Disney have done so with their content – the default was to give the ACM this copyright control.

James O’Brien brought it to our attention that this policy has been revised, and I asked Stephen Spencer (SIGGRAPH’s Director of Publications) for details. His explanation follows.

ACM has recently changed its copyright policy to include the option, under certain circumstances, of retaining copyright on embedded content in material published by ACM. Embedded content can now fall into one of three categories: copyright of the content is transferred to ACM as part of the rest of the paper (the default), the content is “third-party” material (not created by the author(s)), or the content is considered an “artistic image.”

The revised copyright form includes this definition of “artistic images”:

“An exception to copyright transfer is allowed for images or figures in your paper which have ‘independent artistic value.’ You or your employer may retain copyright to the artistic images or figures which you created for some purpose other than to illustrate a point in this paper and which you wish to exploit in other contexts.”

The ACM Copyright Policy page also documents this change in policy.

ACM’s electronic copyright system is being updated to implement this change; authors who wish to declare one or more pieces of embedded content in their papers as “artistic images” should contact Stephen Spencer (at <spencer@cs.washington.edu>) to receive a PDF version of the revised copyright form.

The copyright form includes instructions for declaring embedded content as “artistic images,” both in your paper and on the copyright form.

—-

Note that this change is “going forward”; if you have already given ACM the copyright, you cannot get it back. Understandable, as otherwise there could be a flood of requests for recategorization.

I’m happy to see this change, it is a good step in the right direction.

OpenGL Insights: Call For Authors

Here’s a book CFP, proposals due right after SIGGRAPH. I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when I heard of this as a book idea. However, OpenGL truly is undergoing a resurgence as of late. Not so much on desktops and laptops, though more games are indeed getting made for Macs. Marc DeLoura has a good article on engines in “Game Developer,” May 2011, noting that 15% of traditional “big game” developers plan on Mac version of their games, vs. a mere 2% in 2009. As it is, most every serious game engine is cross-platform, so OpenGL’s special features (and bugs) are not so vital to engine users. Rather, the handheld market is where OpenGL is the only game in town. So, knowing how to make this API sing is pretty vital if you’re working in that area.

The editors: Patrick Cozzi you probably don’t know (yet), though I did point earlier to a poster for this year’s SIGGRAPH that he coauthored (it’s a clever technique). Among other things, he’s first author on a book that’s not out yet, but will be by SIGGRAPH: 3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes (you can download book samples and the code). Christophe Riccio you may have heard of if you work with the OpenGL SDK. He maintains the OpenGL Samples, GLM (math), and GLI (imaging). These guys look like good people for the job: energetic and intelligent. So, here’s the CFP – you can comment on it at their blog. Me, just reading their list of topics of interest, I’ll get a copy even if they get articles on just a very few of these. If $50 (or whatever) saves us a day of going down a wrong path, it’s worth it.

It is with great enthusiasm that we invite you to contribute to OpenGL Insights, a book containing original articles on OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and WebGL techniques by the OpenGL community and for the OpenGL community: from game programmers to web developers to researchers. OpenGL Insights will be published by A K Peters, Ltd. / CRC Press in time for SIGGRAPH 2012.

Given the wide array of OpenGL platforms, from Mac desktops to Android phones to web browsers, we invite you to submit article proposals on all aspects of OpenGL development, including performance tuning, recent GL features/extensions, application architecture, vendor-specific techniques, WebGL, and interoperability with other APIs. We are interested in proposals based on your unique real-world experience using OpenGL. Some ideas include:

  • OpenGL performance, for example:
    • Best performance practices for using vertex buffers
    • Best performance practices for texture streaming
    • Performance and memory profiling techniques
    • 64-bit performance considerations
    • Multithreading with OpenGL
  • Modern OpenGL 3 and 4 programming, for example:
    • Introduction to tessellation
    • Image load and store
    • Programmable multisampling
    • Using shader subroutines effectively
    • Managing uniform data
    • Strategies for debugging OpenGL applications
  • Application architecture, for example:
    • Porting between Direct3D and OpenGL
    • Writing portable code between OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and WebGL
    • Designing an OpenGL-based graphics engine
    • A testing framework for OpenGL applications
    • Shader architecture best practices, e.g., shader binaries and separate shaders
    • Cross-platform programming with OpenGL
    • Tools, libraries
  • Vendor-specific techniques, for example:
    • Understanding and optimizing for specific hardware and driver implementations: AMD, Apple, ARM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, S3 Graphics, etc.
    • Bindless Graphics: GL_NV_shader_buffer_load and GL_NV_vertex_buffer_unified_memory
    • How VAO works on AMD drivers
    • Taking advantage of deferred tile rendering on PowerVR
    • How GLSL compiler works
    • Understanding multithreaded OpenGL drivers
  • OpenGL ES, for example:
    • Best practices for targeting both desktop and mobile devices
    • Targeting multiple mobile device platforms
    • Developing with power consumption in mind
    • Differences between desktop and mobile devices
  • WebGL, for example:
    • Introduction to WebGL for web developers
    • Introduction to WebGL for OpenGL developers
    • Optimizing WebGL applications
    • Writing large-scale software in JavaScript
    • Understanding web browser implementations of WebGL
    • WebGL interoperability with WebCL
  • Interoperability, for example:
    • Hybrid OpenGL and OpenCL/CUDA rendering pipelines
    • Working with both OpenGL and Direct3D
    • OpenGL interoperability with OpenCL and CUDA
  • Inspirational thoughts and experiences:
    • OpenGL’s 20th anniversary: history and evolution
    • ARB members and OpenGL developers interviews
    • OpenGL software making of
    • Daily programmer experiences with OpenGL

These are, of course, examples. Please don’t feel limited to these areas.

The planned schedule is:

August 15, 2011 Proposals due
September 1, 2011 Authors selected
November 1, 2011 Articles due
December 1, 2011 Peer review feedback due
December 15, 2011 Revised articles due, all articles sent to publisher
January 1, 2012 Supplemental material due, e.g., videos, source code, etc.
SIGGRAPH 2012 Book released

Please send proposals to editors@openglinsights.com using this example proposal as a template by August 15th.

Proposals should include the title, your name and affiliation, a one-page abstract, and anything else you feel helps convey your article such as related images or references. Proposals must demonstrate the author’s real-world OpenGL experience and ability to write clearly. Proposals can have multiple authors, and a single author can submit multiple proposals. There is no required article length, but we expect most articles will be 5-20 pages. Example code can be written in any language on any platform.

Please feel free to contact us for additional discussion. We’re looking forward to putting together a valuable book for the OpenGL community.

Thanks,

Patrick Cozzi and Christophe Riccio, Editors

www.openglinsights.com

More Free GDC 2011 Content in Vault

In my previous GDC links post, I briefly mentioned the free section of the GDC Vault, and listed individual links to a few of the many videos and presentation slides available there. I’ll list more links to free Vault content in this post, mostly stuff of interest to readers of this blog that isn’t otherwise available online.

Videos (many of these have presentation slides available from one of the links included in my previous post):

Slides (skipping any talks linked in my previous post):

GDC 2011 Links

Since it’s quite a long time after GDC 2011 and I never found the time to do a proper conference report, I thought I’d at least do a link roundup.

First, the GDC Vault has a Free Section with many presentation slides. Video for most talks is behind a paywall, but several notable talks have freely available video:

There are several other talks with free video, mostly sponsored by companies such as Intel and NVIDIA.

The rest of this post will cover talks where the authors or their companies have made materials available outside the Vault – I haven’t checked, but I suspect there is a fair bit of overlap with the free section in the Vault.

Presentations from the “Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11” tutorial day:

These are hosted on the AMD conference presentations page, which also has a few other AMD presentations:

Presentations from the “Physics for Game Programmers” tutorial day (these are only some of the presentations, it looks like the rest are up on the Vault’s free section):

Presentations from the Technical Artist Bootcamp can be found here – links to individual presentations follow:

DICE had quite a few presentations at GDC, many related to real-time rendering. All DICE presentations can be found on their publications page.

One DICE presentation of particular interest, Approximating Translucency for a Fast, Cheap and Convincing Subsurface Scattering Look (Colin Barre-Brisebois) can also be found on the author’s blog, along with an addendum.

NVIDIA also had a good number of presentations, to be found on their GDC 2011 page. An especially notable one (jointly presented with covered the Epic “Samaritan” demo, intended both to show off the Unreal Engine’s DX11 feature set, and to set a quality bar for the makers of next-generation consoles (the demo was shown on a machine with three GeForce GTX 580 cards connected via SLI, so definitely a “futuristic” system). Online material for the Samaritan demo includes the presentation slides, video of the demo, and some additional technical details on the underlying technology.

Intel also has a dedicated web page for their GDC 2011 presentations. Two especially interesting ones covered Order-Independent Transparency and Dynamic Resolution Rendering. Additional organizations with multiple talks at GDC included AutoDesk and Khronos.

The talk Mega Meshes: Modeling, Rendering and Lighting a World Made of 100 Billion Polygons (Ben Sugden & Michal Iwanicki, Lionhead) presented some unique rendering technology they developed for the (cancelled) game, Milo & Kate. Additional online materials include a video and a second video.

Other rendering talks with online materials include Anti-Aliasing From a Different Perspective (Dmitry Andreev, LucasArts), Practical Occlusion Culling on PS3 (Will Vale, Second Intention), Normal Offset Shadows (poster by Daniel Holbert, High Moon), HTML5 and Other Modern Browser Game Tech (Vincent Scheib, Google), and several presentations that Wolfgang Engel (Confetti) gave at the Intel booth.

Two animation talks also have online materials: The Animation of Halo: Reach: Raising the Bar (Joe Spataro & Tam Armstrong, Bungie), and An Automated Pipeline for Generating Run-Time Rigs (Adam Mechtley, Candlelight Interactive), as well as three non-graphics engineering talks: Forensic Debugging: How To Autopsy, Repair, and Reanimate a Release-built Game (Elan Ruskin, Valve), I Shot You First! Gameplay Networking in Halo: Reach (David Aldridge, Bungie) (there is also a much smaller file without video), and Message Queuing on a Large Scale (Jon Watte, IMVU).

For the sake of completeness, I’ll also list the design, production, and business presentations and videos I found online:

If you find any other presentations online, please put a link in the comments to this post.