[{Sniping}Waste]

http://www.ati.com/developer/techpapers.html
I like the one on how to draw a diamond.
http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc/Gosselin_Gem.pdf
The one about rendering hair is great too.
http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc/Sch...rRendering.pdf

[SiliconAbyss]

WOW the diamond and hair rendering is awesome! Thanx for the linky's still pouring over them.

[Tim Murray]

Oh, ATI. You entitled the diamond one "Phat Lewt." I'm so going to kick your collective ass now.

The hair is remarkably unimpressive, IMO. It looks like polygons--maybe if you were going to perform cel shading for some sort of anime-inspired game, it'd look okay, but that just looks weird.

[Ostsol]

Well certainly better hair can be accomplished with demo-quality methods, but ATI's focus was probably more on what is practical for games.

[Chalnoth]

I don't think I like idea of using the rainbow map for dispersion on that diamond. I mean, it's not like it's for a game anyway, so why not just go all out? Why not just calculate the lookup in the environment map per-color?

[DemoCoder]

I thought ATI's skin shader was really unimpressive. Mistake #1 was showing it side by side with the Matrix Reloaded skinshader. But it also looks much worse than Dawn/Dusk's.

The diamond is uber cool tho.

[V3]

There is normal map compression as one of the new feature for R420 ?

But I must say that Matrix reloaded skinshader looks photoreal, too bad none of our realtime solution come close to it yet

[Wunderchu]

Originally Posted by Ostsol

Well certainly better hair can be accomplished with demo-quality methods, but ATI's focus was probably more on what is practical for games.

I agree ... after looking though most of those new presentations, IMO it looks as though ATI 's presentations at this year's GDC were aimed at giving developers a few practical examples of effects that are applicable right now, in games that are currently in development..

Originally Posted by V3

But I must say that Matrix reloaded skinshader looks photoreal, too bad none of our realtime solution come close to it yet

those faces for the The Matrix: Reloaded had ~10 million triangles of raw detail (source: http://www.virtualcinematography.org...Face-s2003.pdf )

[Colourless]

The hair looks fairly good. Sure, it's not perfect, but it certinaly would be a huge improvement over what games currently have.

[Humus]

I think the hair looks pretty cool. A little polygonal, but you could just use smaller patches.

[RussSchultz]

Maybe it looks better in action. As stills, it looks like somebody has a bad wig made out of palm fronds.

[shanehudson]

Originally Posted by RussSchultz

Maybe it looks better in action. As stills, it looks like somebody has a bad wig made out of palm fronds.

Dude, have you seen hairstyles these days? :P

[davepermen]

the hair is cool, yeah. depends on style.. i think some style of hair will not be available for a long time.

but this is the style you can see in the hair-gel-adverts on tv, and they look pretty similar. so far, so good

[Chalnoth]

Looks matted to me, like the person hasn't washed their hair in a while, or likes to use tons of gel.

Anyway, I'm not terribly impressed with this particular style of hair rendering. I think better should be possible with similar or lesser polycounts, but somewhat more complex shaders.

[Laa-Yosh]

Dawn's skin shader uses no translucency fake AFAIK, only some facing ratio (or Fresnel term) controlled gradients on the diffuse and specular channels. ATI's shader is actually not that bad, and I like the speculars - but the source art could be better.

Interestingly, Nvidia has a very similar shader in their recent presentations

[Himself]

Originally Posted by Colourless

The hair looks fairly good. Sure, it's not perfect, but it certinaly would be a huge improvement over what games currently have.

exactly

Wouldn't polygon based be less taxing to animate as well?

[Chalnoth]

The problem with animating that hair is that it's alpha blended, and the rendering algorithm uses an approximation for back-to-front sorting for proper alpha blending, an approximation that would break very quickly with anything but the most subtle animation. The algorithm also won't work with all hair styles for the same reason (as far as I can tell, it's only good for variations on the one hair style displayed).

[sonix666]

I was most impressed with the rendering at page 14 in the hair presentation.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by sonix666

I was most impressed with the rendering at page 14 in the hair presentation.

Now that's something that could really be used in games.