“ToyShop” by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Conference:
SIGGRAPH Video Review:
Track:
- 28
Title:
- ToyShop
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Description:
“ToyShop” demonstrates state-of-the-art, real-time rendering on consumer graphics cards, such as ATI Radeon X1800. A variety of high-end techniques were designed with the sole purpose of creating an immersive, detail-rich, real-time environment. And while these methods surpass convention, they are implemented efficiently within the current specs of the most cutting-edge, popular videogame engines.
One of these complex techniques is parallax-occlusion map-ping, a per-pixel ray-tracing algorithm for inverse-displacement mapping with dynamic lighting, soft shadows, self-occlusions, and motion parallax for rendering complex surface details with low polygonal meshes. A novel post-processing rain effect was developed to simulate multiple layers of raindrops with a com-positing pass over the rendered scene. The rain illumination is computed by combining water-to-air refraction for individual rain-drops, a Fresnel effect, and reflections due to surrounding light sources.
Physics-based particle systems with stretched normal mapped quads generated raindrops falling off objects, complete with the illusion of motion blur. The illumination from the lightning system accurately simulated refraction and reflection of the droplets, adding further realism to the scene. An offline raindrop simulation system was adapted to the GPU to simulate and render water droplets trickling down glass panes in real time.
Hardware:
ATI Radeon X1800 graphics card, Intel Pentium 4 3.4 GHz CPU system with 1 GB of RAM
Software:
Rendered with ATI Research Sushi v.2.0 real-time rendering engine
Art and prototype technology generated using Maya 6.0, Adobe Photoshop CS, ATI NormalMapper, and ATI CubeMapGen tools
ATI RenderMonkey shader development environment
Additional Contributors:
Directors: Natalya Tatarchuk, David Gosselin, Dan Roeger
Producers: Callan McInally, Lisa Close
Lead Programmers: Natalya Tatarchuk, David Gosselin
Programming/Shader Programming: John Isidoro, Dan Ginsburg, Thorsten Scheuermann, Chris Oat
Lead Artist: Dan Roeger
Artists: Daniel Szecket, Abe Wiley, Eli Turner
Previous Programming: Alex Vlachos, Chris Brennan
QA: Paul Cintolo
Sound Designer: Bill Chesley
Composer: Augustus DiCadillac
Audio Producer: Kate Gibson
