29 replies to this topic

[Yours3!f]

After seeing the video and hearing "voxel lighting" I expect their lighting tech to be http://research.nvidia.com/publication/interactive-indirect-illumination-using-voxel-cone-tracing or something very similar.

Yeah. That's exactly what I'm talking about

[Frenetic Pony]

Yeah, I remember that paper. It wasn't even close to realtime, but I've been thinking about how to get rid of a lot of the overhead from that. I mean, they rendered all the geometry six times to get a voxel representation, and, why not just have some sort of proxy voxels for everything already.

Still, impressive improvements all around.

[MJP]

Apparently they are tracing a voxel tree: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/stunning-videos-show-unreal-engine-4s-next-gen-gtx-680-powered-real-time-graphics/

[M6dEEp]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1gzb2tXipc

In this video the guy says that you cannot implement this with deferred rendering (at like 2:30). Either he doesn't know what he's talking about because the guy showing the UE4 demo said that they were using deferred rendering, or they are using a different technique.. I haven't read the paper on it yet but does anyone know what sort of rendering architectures are compatible with the technique described in the video (deferred, forward, multipass etc)?

[jameszhao00]

@m6d think that's Light Propgation Volumes? I'm also unsure as to why he's relating 'deferred shading' to the initial radiance injection using a RSM...
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Square enix's tech demo -

The facial animation/rendering/beard at 5:30 looked great.

Edited by jameszhao00, 08 June 2012 - 09:44 PM.

[L. Spiro]

A few people have been asking me if I worked on the Square Enix engine.
I have in the past had an affiliation with Square Enix as an engine programmer for this engine and made a small contribution (I am still affiliated but not relating to their engine).

What I can say about this engine is:

• DirectX 11. Obviously.
• The low points are the post-processing effects, which were deferred to an outside company (the effects are not really tailored to the scenes), and the flickering. They use too-low-resolution buffers for bloom filtering etc. Look for incongruent motion blur and other minor aspects.
• The high points are the hair, shadow quality, and number of particles. The particles are GPGPU-based, and as such I would expect more than there are, but the amount there is still impressive. Unreal Engine 4 however does better in this department.
• Mega-textures copied from Mr. Carmack.

Most of the reason the Square Enix video looks better than the Unreal Engine 4 video is due to art assets. Frankly, the way the clothes move over the characters and the nature of the action in the video is more appealing than a no-named knight stepping out of his castle and slamming a hammer down.

Put graphics aside for one moment and look at what really excites you in each demo and it won’t be the technology. It will be the actions inside the demos themselves, and Square Enix uses that fact to subconsciously add some excitement towards their engine.


Overall, real-time global illumination was the next big step up. The biggest step up for Square Enix was mega-textures and GPGPU particle systems, but neither are really new.


That being said, both engines are made for a certain purpose, and since role-playing games are linear in play, they don’t actually need global illumination. Putting more detail into the hair is actually more appropriate for the type of games they intend to make with that engine.


Both engines look great, and it gives me some goals for my own engine.


L. Spiro

[Amr0]

Both engines look great, and it gives me some goals for my own engine.

Completely off-topic: I clicked the link to your engine but I can't see any pictures?

[L. Spiro]

Inside the blog posts.
http://lspiroengine.com/?p=464

Bear in mind that graphics are just a part of the whole, and so the simple graphics I have posted do not represent the full extents of the engine at all.


L. Spiro

[coderchris]

In the original voxel cone tracing demo, they add dynamic objects to the voxel octree by injecting the voxels, then rebuilding the octree, which allows dynamic objects to cast indirect light (aka the moving hand).

Assuming UE4 uses this same method, I'm a bit worried about the performance implications in terms of dynamic objects. In their demo, they don't see to have problems because there's only a handful of dynamic objects. But, if you wanted to have a building collapse, or just a room full of boxes... I'm skeptical that you would be able to inject that many objects and rebuild the octree in a reasonable amount of time. We'll see.

Nevertheless, their implementation is really sweet...

[Frenetic Pony]

In the original voxel cone tracing demo, they add dynamic objects to the voxel octree by injecting the voxels, then rebuilding the octree, which allows dynamic objects to cast indirect light (aka the moving hand).

Assuming UE4 uses this same method, I'm a bit worried about the performance implications in terms of dynamic objects. In their demo, they don't see to have problems because there's only a handful of dynamic objects. But, if you wanted to have a building collapse, or just a room full of boxes... I'm skeptical that you would be able to inject that many objects and rebuild the octree in a reasonable amount of time. We'll see.

I'm fairly certain that this is the bottleneck they solved. The demo, as you said, didn't seem to have any problem, and is apparently running on a single gtx 680 with all that other stuff going on. The paper's method slowed to an absolute crawl on GTX 480 when absolutely anything was moved.