A real-time post-processing crash course

Revision 2015 took place last month, on the Easter weekend as usual. I was lucky enough to attend and experience the great competitions that took place this year; I can’t recommend you enough to check all the good stuff that came out of it.

Like the previous times I shared some insights in a seminar, as an opportunity to practice public talking. Since our post-processing have quite improved with our last demo (Ctrl-Alt-Test : G – Level One), the topic was the implementation of a few post-processing effects in a real-time renderer: glow, lens flare, light streak, motion blur…

Having been fairly busy over the last months though, with work and the organising of Tokyo Demo Fest among others, I couldn’t afford as much time as I wanted to spend on the presentation unfortunately. An hour before the presentation I was still working on the slides, but all in all it went better than expected. I also experimented with doing a live demonstration, hopefully more engaging than some screenshots or even a video capture can be.

Here is the video recording made by the team at Revision (kudos to you guys for the fantastic work this year). I will provide the slides later on, after I properly finish the credits and references part.

Abstract:
Over decades photographers, then filmmakers, have learned to take advantage of optical phenomenons, and perfected the recipe of chemicals used in films, to affect the visual appeal of their images. Transposed to rendering, those lessons can make your image more pleasant to the eye, change its realism, affect its mood, or make it easier to read. In this course we will present different effects that can be implemented in a real-time rendering pipeline, the theory behind them, the implementation details in practice, and how they could fit in your workflow.

Insight In An Unseizable World, by Cocoon

Last Fall, the French demogroup Cocoon uncovered this beautiful ambient demo: Insight In An Unseizable World. Its technical features, including real-time fluid dynamics or screen space reflections, manage to stay humble a leave the full stage to the superb direction. The special attention given to transition is outstanding, and I invite you to see by yourselves.

Intrinsic Gravity, by Still

Three years ago, the German demoscene group, Still, was releasing an experiment at shaping some of the work of late painter Victor Vasarely as animated figures in a tribute demo: Beta. The unusual style from a demoscene standpoint, extrapolating what his work would have been if it were animated, was a success.

Last week Still released another demo with a similar geometric style and a brilliant direction: Intrinsic Gravity. It serves as an invitation to the demoparty NVScene, to take place in San Jose, California, this March.

I recommend you these two demos, they are a pleasure to watch.

Relativistic and non euclidean space rendering

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:

Invitation to Revision party 2014

Revision is a big demoparty held each year at Easter, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Whenever possible, it is a custom in the demoscene to release a production dedicated to officially announce upcoming parties: an invitation.

Last weekend at the Ultimate Meeting, the invitation to Revision 2014 was presented. The quality of invitations can vary wildly, from rushed and uninspired to works of art (Kings of the playground or You Should are two examples that come to mind); this new invitation is rather on the higher end of the spectrum. Aiming for epic feeling, and nailing it, it imagines a time when the mostly unheard off sub culture has become a dominant one and the reason for a major Super Bowl like event in a Tron like set.

Enjoy it and its dry wit jokes. :)

FaceWorks demonstration at GTC

Geeks3D mentioned this keynote at the GPU Technology Conference, where NVIDIA’s CEO shows their technology called FaceWorks. After talking about the uncanny valley and avatar rendering uses, came the live demonstration, which seriously raises the bar in terms of face rendering and animation.

The quality is incredible, the gap from photo realism is getting very narrow, and some expressions are really convincing. The transitions and frozen expressions feel weird though, so I am wondering how it would look running freely for a moment, with all the rapid subtle moves we show even when staying idle. The avatar as a mean of communication is certainly very appealing. It would be interesting to see if when facing this rendering, we would react to the expressions displayed.

The demo itself starts after 8 minutes.