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.

Technology showcase by BeautyPi

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

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! :)