Reading list on skin rendering

Posted on 2012-11-05 by Julien Guertault

Skin rendering is really not my thing. Yet. I have too much figuring out rendering of opaque materials already to deal with ones exhibiting sub-surface scattering. But I got trapped reading one article and then another.. and before I knew I had a list I wanted to note for later reference.

The NVidia Human Head demo, featuring Doug Jones, referred by many as the golden standard of real-time skin rendering (article in Chapter 14 of GPU Gems 3).
In 2009, Jorge Jimenez et al. published a paper presenting a Screen Space Sub-Surface Scattering technique (blog post).
He later published another paper in 2010 on skin translucency, and finally released his separable sub-surface scattering demo last year.
At the Advances in Real-Time Rendering course of SIGGRAPH 2010, John Hable presented the techniques used to render characters in Uncharted 2 (PowerPoint slides, PDF version, presentation on SlideShare).
Next year at the same SIGGRAPH course, Eric Penner presented a technique called pre-integrated skin rendering (PowerPoint slides, presentation on SlideShare).
Skin rendering is also an recurring topic on Angelo Pesce‘s blog: here and here as well as here and here.

Many links missing, as I’m not done checking the major techniques mentioned in the presentations, but perfect is the enemy of good after all.

Series of articles on anti-aliasing

Posted on 2012-10-29 by Julien Guertault

Matt Pettineo is writing an interesting and in-depth series of articles on anti-aliasing:

In this last article, he provides a list of captures comparing the results he obtained, as well as the source code.

On a side note, I like this short post of Timothy Lottes (well known for FXAA and TXAA) where he compares typical film image with typical video game one. His example of temporal aliasing is also worth keeping in mind.

Technology showcase by BeautyPi

Posted on 2012-10-03 by Julien Guertault

Back in 2009, Iñigo Quilez was leaving everyone in awe by releasing the milestone 4kB intro, Elevated, in cooperation with the group TBC. If you haven’t seen this masterpiece, watch it, and keep in mind this was generated from only 4096 bytes worth of data (just the text of this article is already more than a third of that).

After that, news were that he was hired by Pixar, and besides some in progress screenshots from time to time and some live coding experiments, not much was heard from him.

Then a couple of months ago this interview was published, and more recently this praising article of CGW, where we could read he had been in charge of the vegetation rendering in Pixar’s Brave. Needless to say, many people were looking forward to seeing what he would do next, especially in the real-time domain.

Today the group he’s part of, BeautyPi, which seems to be focusing on interactive animations (they presented their work earlier this year at SIGGRAPH), has published the following video. Being a showcase of their last experiments, it is not entertaining like an animation, a clip or a demo are. You could even say it’s boring. But it is visually very impressive, both technically and artistically. Although this is some real-time material, the quality is not that far from movie standards. Regarding the interaction, I am suspecting they are only scratching the surface and they may come up with some very interesting things. What these folks are doing is definitely worth following.

Crysis 3 tech demo

Posted on 2012-08-11 by Julien Guertault

Crytek has published a video showing the rendering technology used in the CryEngine, more specifically in Crysis 3. While I don’t really dig the artistic choices (I find the overall image to be messy due to the high contrast and not that appealing, aesthetically speaking), the technical side is impressive. I especially like the use displacement mapping and tessellation for the vegetation (by the way, see how great that leaf looks; they got the material completely right). The reflexions visible at 1’52 make me think they also implemented the cone tracing technique, just like Unreal did. On the downside, all the parts with falling water felt unrealistic to me.

Last but not least, Toad Technology! :)

Octree-Based Sparse Voxelization for Real-Time Global Illumination

Posted on 2012-07-02 by Julien Guertault

Last year Cyril Crassin presented a voxel based approach for interactively computing indirect diffuse and specular lighting, along with a couple of demonstration videos, and kept working on the matter since then.

In this talk given in May at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, he briefly explains the technique:

Interestingly enough, as he points out, the technique has been implemented in the Unreal Engine 4 already.

Watch Dogs

Posted on 2012-06-06 by Julien Guertault

Ubisoft made an impression at E3 by unveiling this video of its upcoming game, Watch Dogs. The mood definitely reminds the original Deus Ex.

Although I am not a fan of violent games, I like the effort put to make it not only look, but feel real: in particular the scene of the random guy trying to get his girlfriend to talk to him after getting shot is quite strong and disturbing.

On the rendering side, there is a lot to notice. Many materials completely nail it (look at that leather coat!), and the faces look really good, especially when back lit.

Final Fantasy tech demo: Agni’s Philosophy

Posted on 2012-06-06 by Julien Guertault

The platform is not specified, but this is advertised as being real-time. Source. Not quite out of the uncanny valley yet in my opinion, but quite some nice skin tones and hair rendering.

Update: Geeks3D pointed out that a video of the demo presentation at E3 is available.

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Thoughts of a graphics programmer, demoscener and spare time photographer

Tag Archives: real-time rendering