Hi guys, I created on my website a new
knowledge section about Rendering Techniques. I listed there 10 awesome in-depth articles about some of the greatest games like Half Life 2, Battlefield 3 or Left 4 Dead 2 - and how they are rendered! You'll find everything on my website, but for your convenience I put also in the following the links to the pdf's and a small summary. It would be cool if you could add some other papers, too, in order to increase the quality and quantity of this list.
Stable SSAO in Battlefield 3 with Selective Temporal FilteringIn this paper, a selective temporal filtering approach is introduced for reducing SSAO flickering on thin objects such as alpha-tested foliage, using a reverse reprojection and a stability classifier. The final SSAO image is smoothed with an approximate cross-bilateral filter. The techniques are used in the PC version of Battlefield 3 (DICE).
"MAXIS-mizing" Darkspore: A Ca...ferred RendererIn this article, it is shown how Maxis implemented a light pre-pass renderer to decouple lighting from the scene geometry for their game Darkspore. It is also shown how the team discovered and fixed certain bottlenecks in their graphics pipeline concerning trees, terrain, character details and the render system.
Uncharted 2: Character Lighting and ShadingIn this paper, it is shown how skin, hair and cloth are rendered in Naughty Dogs' game Uncharted 2. The main subject is the improvement of a Subsurface Scattering technique by NVidia. The paper concludes with several sidenotes about hacks, wise shader usage, lighting models and details in normal maps.
Toy Story 3: The Video Game - Rendering TechniquesThis paper explains 3 novel rendering techniques used in Toy Story 3: The Video Game (Avalanche Software), including: SSAO (using Line Integrals & random rotated paired sampling), Ambient Lighting (using volume-based Irradiance Light Rigs) & a combinatorial Soft Shadow Mapping solution, which exploits simple technqiues.
Rendering Wounds in Left 4 Dead 2In Left 4 Dead there were 5 static wound models built into each Zombie. In this paper it is explained, how Valve created a dynamic wound system for their Zombies in Left 4 Dead 2. The wounds are generated by mixing seperated wound models with projected textures and a pose-space ellipsoid culling method, to cut holes into bodies.
Covering New Ground: Foliage Rendering in PureIn this paper a fast multi-pass technique is demonstrated, that uses a screen space alphamask to render alpha textured geometry for large scale foliage, avoiding some alpha-blending and -testing related problems. The technique is used in the game Pure (Blackrock Studio).
Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2This paper explains how the game Killzone 2 (Guerilla) is rendered and how it was optimized for the PS3. Using a forward & deferred renderer, it is shown, how the game is lighted, how weapons & decals are treated, how soft shadowmaps are generated and what post-processing effects are added afterwards.
Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2The paper explains how the unique rendering style of the game Team Fortress 2 (Valve) has been achieved. A set of artistic choices and novel real-time shading techniques are presented, which support each other and are designed to achieve the look of early 20th century commercial illustrations.
Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special EffectsIn this paper, a simple and yet efficient method is shown, which allows to render high-resolution shapes by alpha-testing a low-resolution distance field texture. With additional pixel shaders, high quality soft edges, outlining and drop shadows can be rendered, too. This technique has been used in Team Fortress 2 (Valve).
Efficient Self-Shadowed Radiosity Normal MappingIn this paper it is shown, how to precompute and use directional ambient occlusion textures together with regular bump mapping, to enhance the self-shadowing of surfaces, illuminated from directional lights. This technique has been used in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (Valve).
Enjoy!
-Christian
