The Game Technology discussion thread *Read first post before posting*

In that gameplay segment I linked to though, a dynamic, moveable light (the flashlight) is reflecting indirect light on to the other walls. My knowledge of the subject is very limited, but I don't think this is doable with probes or irradiance volumes. In the Far Cry 3 case, the PC spec secondary lights, i.e not sun/moon, that bounce light are stationary. The flashlight, though, is moveable.

Can you take a print screen of whatever moment in the scene you saw bouced light and highlight it for us, because I've tried to spot any evidence of bounced light but couldn't find any. But I could be missing something.

By the way, just like static baked lightmaps, enlighten can be done on a per texel or per vertex fashion, with the expected differences in result. LoU though, seems to be using texture based lightmaps instead of the vertex one of the Uncarted games, as they show higher frequency detail and indirect shadows with well defined silhouettes from static geometry (though that could maybe be coming from the same tech that produces the real time soft shadows of characters we've spoted on the gameplay segments which we still don't know how they work)

Regardless, we can expect some interesting tech to be driving the GI of this game, be that on the offline side or real time, as the developers already stated in interviews that was a big focus of reserch for the graphics team on this project because the art style and the electricity free enviroments required better radiosity to still look good and interesting.
 
He's referring to the flashlight bouncing light onto nearby walls at the 15m15s mark.

My bad, I was stupidly looking at the flashlight segment in the other trailer.
I still suspect this could be a similar hack to the one used in Uncharted 3. Watch this gameplay video starting from 2:50 mark.


The light shafts are clearly dynamic, as they move around as the plane rocks from side to side. And they do produce some bouced light, but I suspect that is no more complex then a point light placed by a software raycast agaist the scene geometry. That can be veryfied by looking at the specular reflection of that bouced light on nearby objects, and they really do look like specular reflections of a mere single pointlight. For the LoU's flashlight, they could easily upgrade the techniche by using more raycasts and more virtual point lights, and that would be good enough at least for scenarios as simple as that one. Bounced light is a pretty low frequency effect anyway, and most people don't pay as much atention as we are right now.
 
The light shafts are clearly dynamic, as they move around as the plane rocks from side to side. And they do produce some bouced light, but I suspect that is no more complex then a point light placed by a software raycast agaist the scene geometry. That can be veryfied by looking at the specular reflection of that bouced light on nearby objects, and they really do look like specular reflections of a mere single pointlight. For the LoU's flashlight, they could easily upgrade the techniche by using more raycasts and more virtual point lights, and that would be good enough at least for scenarios as simple as that one. Bounced light is a pretty low frequency effect anyway, and most people don't pay as much atention as we are right now.
Never noticed the bounce in that scene, it was clear that they didn't have it in flashlight/torch scenes.
 
http://crytek.com/cryengine/presentations/the-rendering-technologies-of-crysis-3

Presentation_Teasers_RenderingTechC3.jpg


http://crytek.com/download/Sousa_Tiago_Rendering_Technologies_of_Crysis3.pptx
http://crytek.com/download/Sousa_Tiago_Rendering_Technologies_of_Crysis3.mov
 
The grass rendering method is impressive. If I read it right PS3 seems to do it with the most efficiency. Though maybe the grass in the PS3 version is less dense which would explain the 10ms and lower job amounts.

I like their stance on AA: include every option! :smile:
 
The grass rendering method is impressive. If I read it right PS3 seems to do it with the most efficiency. Though maybe the grass in the PS3 version is less dense which would explain the 10ms and lower job amounts.

I like their stance on AA: include every option! :smile:

I think the amount of jobs are only for LoD branching not rendering.
I'm actually interested what kind of CPU they were using in this test. 15ms is very expensive.
 
Regarding LoU indirect shadows...
I was reading this old post about diferent real time AO aproaches attempted by the gentleman from direct to video, and at some point he talks about how he achieved the long range AO for a spider character on his demo, and it looks a lot like what happens in LoU, and his method is very close to what I would have guessed Naughty Dog was doing. Check it out, the description is right above the spider picture.
http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/ambient-occlusion-in-frameranger/
 
Regarding LoU indirect shadows...
I was reading this old post about diferent real time AO aproaches attempted by the gentleman from direct to video, and at some point he talks about how he achieved the long range AO for a spider character on his demo, and it looks a lot like what happens in LoU, and his method is very close to what I would have guessed Naughty Dog was doing. Check it out, the description is right above the spider picture.
http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/ambient-occlusion-in-frameranger/
When I first saw the game play of TLOU I didn't realize that the indirect shadows were in real time until the player moved and that flashlight scene was more than just impressive.
And that is definitely not SSAO, AO method regardless maybe we'll know about it more once it's white paper releases.
Also, I found many similarities between this and ISM, the only difference being is that ISM is very heavy.
 
The article does not talk SSAO, exept for dismissing it. The soultion I was reffering to, was about rendering an animated character from the top and aplying that to the scene as a blob shadow, but he does some stuff to blur it out and make it so it's darker when the caster is closer to the shadow receiving surface.The reason I think LoU could be doing this is, besides those similar characterisics, from everything shown of the game so far, all those indirect shadows could very well be only character based, Haven't seen huge portions of the game level cast dynamic secondary shadows, which leands me to believe all the GI is baked for the enviroment and characters just cast these glorified blob shadows that modulate the ambient term. The light bouncing from the flashlight is something else, and that didn't seem to have very detailed shadowing, if any, anyway.
 
The article does not talk SSAO, exept for dismissing it. The soultion I was reffering to, was about rendering an animated character from the top and aplying that to the scene as a blob shadow, but he does some stuff to blur it out and make it so it's darker when the caster is closer to the shadow receiving surface.The reason I think LoU could be doing this is, besides those similar characterisics, from everything shown of the game so far, all those indirect shadows could very well be only character based,
The method is something different from what was in frameranger. (a top down shadowmap.)

My bet would be either sphere/ellipsoid based shadows or volumetric ones.
Something like following.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~bosun/sig06.htm
 
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The article does not talk SSAO, exept for dismissing it. The soultion I was reffering to, was about rendering an animated character from the top and aplying that to the scene as a blob shadow, but he does some stuff to blur it out and make it so it's darker when the caster is closer to the shadow receiving surface.The reason I think LoU could be doing this is, besides those similar characterisics, from everything shown of the game so far, all those indirect shadows could very well be only character based, Haven't seen huge portions of the game level cast dynamic secondary shadows, which leands me to believe all the GI is baked for the enviroment and characters just cast these glorified blob shadows that modulate the ambient term. The light bouncing from the flashlight is something else, and that didn't seem to have very detailed shadowing, if any, anyway.
I agree, only the characters have indirect shadows the rest of the world has pre generated lighting.
The Flashlight scene doesn't seem to have indirect shadows, just simple light bounces.
 
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