GDC 2015 presentations

Posted on 2015-03-09 by Julien Guertault

The Game Developers Conference took place last week in San Francisco. As I am starting to see more speakers publish their slides, I am creating this post to keep track of some them (this list is not meant to be exhaustive).

Advanced VR Rendering, by Alex Vlachos (Valve).
Code Clinic 2015: How to Write Code the Compiler Can Actually Optimize, by Mike Acton (Insomniac Games).
Doing Math with RGB (and A) Correctly, by Jim Van Verth (Google).
Great Management of Technical Leads, by Mike Acton (Insomniac Games).
Parallelizing the Naughty Dog engine using fibers, by Christian Gyrling (Naughty Dog).
Physics for Game Programmers : Numerical Methods, by Erin Catto (Blizzard Entertainment).
Rendering the World of Far Cry 4, by Steve McAulley (Ubisoft Montréal).
VR Direct: How NVIDIA Technology is Improving the VR Experience, by Nathan Reed (NVidia).

For a more extensive list, Cédric Guillemet has been garnering links to GDC 2015 papers on his blog.

John Carmack on Oculus at GDC 2015

Posted on 2015-03-08 by Julien Guertault

John Carmack, the CTO of Oculus VR, gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference that just ended this week. Various topics are addressed, including the story behind Samsung’s Gear VR and what’s coming next, the democratization of virtual reality, the work on the API, the unsolved problem of controllers in VR, or the use of real-time ray tracing in VR.

John Carmack’s GDC 2015 talk.

It is a fairly long video (1h30), and as often with him, there are no pictures to see, just hear his personal views and insights on the work he is currently taking care of.

Issues when rendering cones on a GPU

Posted on 2014-12-16 by Julien Guertault

Eric Haines reminds in a blog article the problems that arise when rendering a cone, which are surprisingly tricky for such a seemingly simple task. A discussion on the topic also spawned on Twitter.

Illustration of texture mapping issues.

Relativistic and non euclidean space rendering

Posted on 2014-12-09 by Julien Guertault

The Portal series built a full game concept out of non euclidean spaces. Besides being great games, I think it is fascinating how true the tagline “Now you’re thinking with portals” is.

Here are two interesting experiments putting the person in different spaces than we are used to due to real world conditions. This video by Varun Ramesh demonstrates a non-euclidean ray tracer:

This other video by the MIT Game Lab demonstrates OpenRelativity, a Unity toolkit allowing simulation of navigation at relativistic speeds, used for the prototype game A Slower Speed of Light:

Update: Sylvain mentioned in comments that Carl Sagan explains those effects in the following video:

Billboards and particle rendering

Posted on 2014-09-01 by Julien Guertault

Geeks3D recently posted a couple of posts on billboards rendering using vertex shader or geometry shader, and particle rendering performance when using point sprites or geometry shader.

The frame debugger in Unity 5

Posted on 2014-08-11 by Julien Guertault

Aras Pranckevičius wrote on the Unity blog about the new frame debugger feature they added to their editor: Frame Debugger in Unity 5.0. The hack, he calls it, is very simple and just consists in interrupting the rendering at a given stage and display whichever frame buffer was active at the moment. Just a couple of days of work; most of the work went into the editor UI.

From the article:

There’s no actual “frame capture” going on; pretty much all we do is stop rendering after some number of draw calls. So if you’re looking at a frame that would have 100 objects rendered and you’re looking at object #10 right now, then we just skip rendering the remaining 90. If at that point in time we happen to be rendering into a render texture, then we display it on the screen.

This means the implementation is simple; getting functionality working was only a few days of work (and then a few weeks iterating on the UI).

Illustration from the article: “Here we are stepping through the draw calls of depth texture creation, in glorious animated GIF form”

Oculus Rift and eye tracking

Posted on 2014-07-29 by Julien Guertault

People on twitter are starting to mention that their Oculus DK2 are being shipped or are arriving. Exciting.

Meanwhile some people have mentioned how eye tracking could be a great addition to a VR set, and some have even started hacking their headset. See for example:

So what’s the point? One use is explained in this paper: Foveated Real-Time Ray Tracing for Virtual Reality Headset. In this excerpt from AMD Developer Summit 2013, the rendering architect of the Frosbite engine, Johan Andersson talks briefly about foveated rendering.

Long story short: Oculus and eye tracking could really mean real-time ray tracing in a matter of years.

Exciting. But I’m repeating myself.

Light is beautiful

Thoughts of a graphics programmer, demoscener and spare time photographer

Category Archives: Rendering