Frostbite Rendering Architecture and Real-Time Procedural Shading and Texturing Techniques

55 Pages·2007·3.35 MB·English

Rendering Architecture and
Real-time Procedural Shading & Texturing Techniques
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Outline
(cid:131) Introduction
(cid:131) Frostbite Engine
(cid:131) Examples from demos
(cid:131) Conclusions
Outline
(cid:131) Introduction
(cid:131) Frostbite Engine
(cid:131) Examples from demos
(cid:131) Conclusions
Complex Games of Tomorrow Demand
High Details and Lots of Attention
(cid:131) Everyone realizes the need to make immersive
environments
(cid:131) Doing so successfully requires many complex shaders
with many artist parameters
(cid:131) We created ~500 custom unique shaders for ToyShop
(cid:131) Newer games and demos demand even more
(cid:131) Unique materials aren’t going to be a reasonable solution in that
setting
(cid:131) We also need to enable artists to work closely with the surface
materials so that the final game looks better
(cid:131) Shader permutation management is a serious problem
facing all game developers
Why Do We Care About Procedural
Generation?
(cid:131) Recent and upcoming games display giant, rich,
complex worlds
(cid:131) Varied art assets (images and geometry) are
difficult and time-consuming to generate
(cid:131) Procedural generation allows creation of many such
assets with subtle tweaks of parameters
(cid:131) Memory-limited systems can benefit greatly from
procedural texturing
(cid:131) Smaller distribution size
(cid:131) Lots of variation
(cid:131) No memory/bandwidth requirements
Procedural Helps You Avoid the
Resolution Problem
(cid:131) Any stored texture has limited resolution.
(cid:131) If you zoom in too closely, you will see a lack of detail
(cid:131) Or even signs of the original pixels in the texture
(cid:131) Procedural patterns can have detail at all scales
(cid:131) Zooming in : introduce new high frequency details as you zoom
(cid:131) Zooming out
(cid:131) A prebaked texture will start tiling or show seams
(cid:131) A procedural texture can be written to cover arbitrarily large
areas without seams or repetition
(cid:131) No mapping problem
(cid:131) Don’t have to worry about texture seams, cracks and other
painful parameterization problems
(cid:131) Solid textures
Where Did That Tank Go?
(cid:131) Networked games have to deal with sending
assets across the network
(cid:131) Sending full content (assets, controls) through the
network is not the best plan for interactivity - delays
(cid:131) Network bandwidth is not increasing at any close rate
to the speed of GPUs and CPUs
(cid:131) Procedural techniques help with this
(cid:131) We can send description in compact form to / from
server
(cid:131) Master particles
(cid:131) Grammar descriptions for objects
(cid:131) Etc…
(cid:131) Content can be generated directly on the client
Let’s Not Forget About Interactivity!
(cid:131) Real-time rendering is quickly becoming fully realistic
(cid:131) Excellent foliage, effects, character rendering
(cid:131) Often because we can author suitable static assets
(cid:131) Interactivity is the next frontier!
(cid:131) Game play is the king!
(cid:131) Games are becoming more and more dynamic
(cid:131) They make it look like you can blow up anything anywhere…
(cid:131) But we can’t use static resources and expect the same level of
interactivity without price
(cid:131) More objects means more draw calls, more memory, more authoring,
more textures, more, more, more….
(cid:131) Eventually the cost becomes too excessive
(cid:131) We can generate objects with procedural techniques
(cid:131) Then use rules to deform / destroy / modify / move them
(cid:131) Better interactivity
Procedural Techniques: Now!
(cid:131) Computers are fast enough so that procedural is
real-time now!
(cid:131) Flexible shader models allow us to directly translate
many of the offline shaders
(cid:131) Direct3D10® opened new doors for procedural
generation in real-time: flexibility and power
(cid:131) Convenience of geometry shaders and stream out
(cid:131) More flexible use of texture / buffer resources
(cid:131) Ability to directly render and filter volume textures
(cid:131) Integer and bitwise operations
Outline
(cid:131) Introduction
(cid:131) Frostbite Engine
(cid:131) Examples from demos
(cid:131) Conclusions