“NVIDIA REAL-TIME GRAPHICS RESEARCH: The GeForce 8 Demo Suite” by NVIDIA DemoTeam

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Conference:


SIGGRAPH Video Review:


Track:


    18

Title:


    NVIDIA REAL-TIME GRAPHICS RESEARCH: The GeForce 8 Demo Suite

Company / Institution / Agency:


  • NVIDIA DemoTeam

Description:


    Efficient Rendering of Human Skin: New research is applied to a high-resolution scan of actor Doug Jones (“Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy”) to enable real-time rendering of natural-looking skin under a variety of lighting conditions.

    A new formulation of light diffusion using sums of Gaussians allows efficient evaluation of subsurface scattering on modern GPUs that accurately models reflectance of a multi-layer skin model. A simple UV parametrization and ambi-ent occlusion map are the only pre-computations required. No other pre-computed transfer is used. Any combination of point, spot, and environment lighting terms can be combined and individually modified in real time. The result is a startling leap forward in realism for real-time characters.

    Froggy: A lonely frog comes to life in a rich pond setting where the user is free to move about the scene and pull, poke, and slap the frog, and watch as he reacts. In addition to realistic water effects and skin rendering, an extremely sophisticated character rig is evaluated completely on the GPU to enable a huge array of realistic deformations as the user pulls the frog skin.

    Cascades: NVIDIA’s Cascades demo features waterfalls flowing down procedurally generated terrain. The waterfalls are simulated and rendered in real time on modern graphics hardware as a dynamic particle system and can be interactively placed anywhere on the terrain by the user. The terrain is also generated by the graphics hardware, on demand, as the user roams.

    PRODUCTION: A head cast of Doug Jones was scanned by XYZRGB and reduced to a 4K x 4K normal map and a 60,000-polygon mesh for real-time rendering. A 4K x 4K color map was derived from a photoshoot of Doug.

Hardware:


    NVIDIA Geforce 8800 Ultra, AMD Athlon 64 FX-55,
    2.0 GB RAM

Software:


    Maya, Photoshop, Custom NVIDIA Demo Engine, UVLayout, ZBrush 2.0, NVIDIA Gelato, Ableton Live, Spectrasonics Atmosphere, AAS Lounge Lizard EP-3

Additional Contributors:


    Director: NVIDIA DemoTeam

    Producer: NVIDIA DemoTeam

    NVIDIA DemoTeam: Curtis Beeson, Steve Burke, Chris Cowan, Keenan Crane, Mark Daly, Cam de Leon, Eugene d’Eon, Jon Finch, Ryan Geiss, Bonnie O’Clair, Alex Sakhartchouk, Michael Thompson

    Additional Contributions: David Luebke, Temis Nunez, Sarah Tariq

    Special Thanks: Doug Jones

Animation / Video Overview:


Type: