“ToyShop” by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

  • ©Natalya Tatarchuk, David Gosselin, and Dan Roeger

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

Animation / Video Overview:


Type: