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.

GDC 2015 presentations

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).

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

Bret Victor – Seeing Space

Following on his previous talks on data visualization and programming interfaces, Bret Victor presents the idea of what he calls a “seeing space”, meant to improve understanding of problems in the context of collaborative engineering.

Seeing Spaces from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

Volumetric light scattering

Here are a couple of links on how to render light scattering effect (aka. volumetric shadows):

 Update:

John Carmack on physically based rendering at QuakeCon 2013

In this (slightly over) one hour talk, 1½ hour including Q&A, John Carmack walks through the physics of light, the early days of rendering, the current state of the art, and the direction it is headed at. In short: until we can afford path tracing, we’re approximating it.

Ambient shadows in The Last of Us

Last month at SIGGRAPH, Michał Iwanicki of Naughty Dogs presented his talk “Lighting technology in The Last of Us”, in which he focused on the technique they used for ambient shadows. In short: light maps and analytic occlusion with ellipsoid approximations of objects. Clever!

Understanding quaternions

Quaternion are a very useful tool in 3D, but also one that is unintuitive and difficult to get a natural feeling about. The talk Jim Van Verth, of EssentialMath, gave earlier at GDC2013 explains some facts about quaternions and how they work, by looking back at their discovery: Understand Quaternions.

Update: on a side note, here is a trick for faster quaternion – vector multiplication.