Techy Gubbins - The Bear and Badger

djchump

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/art-directing-effects-for-infamous-second-son/

So jealous right now...

LazyGunn

Phwoar this is great http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/gtc2014/S4880.html

LazyGunn

djchump wrote:

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/art-directing-effects-for-infamous-second-son/ So jealous right now...

Looking at that game slowly, they have some really lovely art going on there. Maybe a game i'll youtube my way through when I have time

djchump

LazyGunn

Woah nice! Do you have any more background on that? Part of physx/apex?

Lots of it was really impressive just to look at but the two examples at around 2:40 onwards were very reflective of practicality that I really liked, locking and rigidbodies launching each other apart as the simulation starts being irritations i encounter quite often in Unity

The new Unity will bring a new Physx (Although Apex and all that fanciness would have to be ported oneself), it would be neat to see this stuff pop up

You might be pleased to know ive nearly got a clue about PBR now chump! Quite proud of myself, even implemented an Oren Nayar BRDF for the diffuse component of a shader framework I use just to see if i could do it... i think i kind of did.. i'm hoping the new Unity also brings a better/more flexible deferred path at least, they have a lot from 4 to fix really. But yeah, PBR is neat as hell - next challenge is providing realtime environment illumination for IBL (Atm the IBL is implemented using cubemaps for the radiance and irradiance using spherical harmonics to pre-filter them. This is too slow for runtime. Importance sampling on the cpu is too slow too), ive been nagging all sorts of people about it, do you have any possible insights?

djchump

It's Nvidia FLEX, which I think is an extension of physx maybe? I'm not entirely sure. More info here:
http://blog.mmacklin.com
http://blog.mmacklin.com/flex/

As for pbr, yeah, it's cool when you get your head round the surfacing because it simplifies the control maps nicely - afaik real time ibl still too expensive for most games beyond things like screen space reflections, so most engines will prebake the cubemaps for you. Presumably the SH prefilter is done in te same manner as Lagarde's fixes for amd cubemapgen? If so, iirc there's a bunch of info how that works on his blog, but doing it every frame to correctly filter the mips on a dynamic env map makes it a bit too costly for the game we're on right now, but we're gonna have to think of something cos the lower mips for the less glossy/ more rough surfaces have huge artifacts on the seams from the driver auto downsample (as they're treated as 6 separate reader targets so can't blur across).

LazyGunn

Sebastein Lagardes blog is absolutely excellent but doesn't really offer a method for runtime map generation, closest i've got is importance sampling using dual paraboliod mapping (Instant speed bump - 2 grabs instead of 6) but its still slow by conventional means. Unity zips those seams nicely enough but its apparently buggy in other ways so eh

One really exciting conv happened after a guy posted about porting OpenCL to unity. I took immediate interest (OpenCL is an idea i have strong feelings about supporting) and looked at and asked him what he planned and put forward the idea of runtime or almost realtime env map filtering on the gpu, taking both SH and importance sampling as approaches to be used as test basis, which developed as part of our dialogue. Very surprisingly he thought they were very good practical examples on how to reap the benefits of runtime parallelisation and seemed quite keen on making that magic happen - additionally he talked of populating environments with probes and culling as needed using bsp or quadtree structure so you'd get a fully setup area generated by opencl with which to use your dynamic-ish probes. Turns out hes very knowledgable on the subject and notable for vfx in fancy animation places, and hes a nice guy! So ill see how that turns out - he's releasing his work to the community also so if you think you could benefit from anything he figures out, i'll send you links if/when they transpire

djchump

Sounds cool! Yeah, compute's generalisation away from raster only is pretty future, esp with those CUs on console now. It's probably just a matter of time til post processing goes fully compute.

LazyGunn

Has your studio grabbed the latest GPU Pro 5 book yet Chump? To say i'm enthusiastic about it is an understatement but I can't afford the fecking thing. An opinion from someone who's flipped through it would be massively appreciated - The tressfx, grass and area light sections being of particular interest

djchump

Nah not yet - we're stuck in DX9 land at the mo.

Blue Swirl

Microsoft has announced the Surface Pro 3. Any takers?

beano

Oh geez, I thought we'd get through the day without me having to resort to:

"Oh look it's got a fan. How's it "fanless", exactly?"

Heh, seriously, though no. I don't use tablets like that. Maybe I should.

edit: FYI, this is for techy gubbins of games, not gadgets...or PCs...not sure you wanted it here.

Blue Swirl

beano wrote:

FYI, this is for techy gubbins of games, not gadgets...or PCs...not sure you wanted it here.

It plays games, if that helps.

beano

Still not sure if you wanted it here but based on past form, it's likely. Just the question, seemed like a general question, as opposed to a 'related' one.

I do have countless times when I want to code or do functional design during deadtime, on trains and such like. This'd do for that but I'm not convinced of the experience, without, well, transforming a tablet into a lappy. Even using a lappy without any peripheral I/O, I can find a pain. Shit, I think I just grey-bearded myself.

In other news, opportunities for words and punctuation mistaken as a new backward smiley are at maximum.

Blue Swirl

beano wrote:

Still not sure if you wanted it here but based on past form, it's likely. Just the question, seemed like a general question, as opposed to a 'related' one.

Fair's fair, I just didn't get why we had two threads about gadgets. This is just the first one I found this morning after checking my RSS feeds.

dynamiteReady

I'm somewhat inspired by this:

Microsoft's sitting on something special there, but they've seriously cocked up with the early DRM proclamations. This is easily the best possible, and least evasive way (both cost, and in application) to control an avatar in a VR environment. I wonder if there are any non Microsoft equivalents out there?

djchump

Crytek pitches their hat into the subscription model engine ring as well: http://www.crytek.com/news/cryengine-now-available-on-steam-for-just-990-usd-eur-per-month

Undercuts UE4 as well, with no royalties clause? (UE4 = $19 pm + 5% royalties, CryEngine = $10 pm and 0 royalties)
Unity now left looking *REALLY* expensive.

dynamiteReady

Can you run the CryEngine on a mobile phone though?

dynamiteReady

Just Googled it. I'll take that back.

LazyGunn

djchump wrote:

Unity now left looking *REALLY* expensive.

God this debate never ends over on the Unity forums, the people making real money with their output tend to buy the right tool for the job, Unity's still completely reasonable a proposition there, but for getting the hobbyists and the startups Unreal and Cryengine are tempting

They don't, however, have such an immense level of 3rd party support via the asset store that could take them quite a long time to catch up with (Epic at least intend something similar though), and i'm told that cryengine is a total pain in the arse to use still, which goes against it heavily when talking hours = productivity

Still, it's interesting, im personally interested in Source 2 as I can imagine Valve being somewhat devilish there

I dunno if you're trolling there really Dynamite, that kinda things been around for ages, we used kinect mocap for the complex anims in last years comp and what was done in that video is absolutely trivial in unity, its good there's such stuff being developed but it would have to be much more responsive and overcome the various flaws with kinect to be real interfaces

acemuzzy

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27677712

Blue Swirl

acemuzzy wrote:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27677712

Holy cack nuggets.

Blue Swirl

Official announcement from Pixar.

As a further commitment to the advancement of open standards and practices, Pixar is announcing that, in conjunction with the upcoming release, free non-commercial licenses of RenderMan will be made available without any functional limitations, watermarking, or time restrictions. Non-commercial RenderMan will be freely available for students, institutions, researchers, developers, and for personal use. Those interested in exploring RenderMan’s new capabilities are invited to register in advance on the RenderMan website to access a free license for download upon release.
[...]

The new RenderMan is being released in the timeframe of SIGGRAPH 2014 and will be compatible with the following 64-bit operating systems, Mac OS 10.8 and 10.7, Windows 8, 7, and Vista, and Linux.

IanHamlett

Fucking hell. I'm guessing the play is get everyone to use this in schools so everyone with any training will already know RenderMan by the time they're in a position to pay.

djchump

Interesting impressions and summary of what's going on with rendering APIs at the moment. Been a lot of recent chatter about OpenGL and the myriad issues it has, with tentative suggestions of ways to fix it, but Khronos group is slow as hell (which was always one of the root causes of opengls issues).

http://c0de517e.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/rate-my-api.html

mk64

I need to bounce some internet around my house. Has anyone got any recommendations for wireless routers?

AJ

Wrong thread (not that I can blame you with the way they're named) but if you want to do what I think you do (extend WiFi reach without adding cables) you'll either want some of those plugs that send networking over power lines and some wireless access points or some wireless repeaters, not more routers. Or a big fuck-off antenna.

dynamiteReady

mk64 wrote:

I need to bounce some internet around my house. Has anyone got any recommendations for wireless routers?

Wrong thread, dude. There's another technology thread in the "not games" section that deals with gadgets. This is more about games specific/related stuff.

...

As for the Renderman announcement, I'm not sure of the impact for realtime games right now. And like the company themselves concede, alternative raytracers have been available for years and years... Renderman is said to be very efficient though, so if it is open sourced (which this announcement does NOT suggest), then the super spod, Carmack types will engorge themselves on a veritable buffet of hardcore maff'.

But this isn't an altruistic move...

The high end, network based CG renderer market as it stands right now has a very small number of customers, and just as small a number of active professionals. Pixar are merely acknowledging the quality of the likes of Mental Ray (and other alternatives), and the impact of pirated software on the jobs market...

AJ

If you didn't spot it from the recent activity, this is a thread you'll get a better response in:
http://www.thebearandbadger.co.uk/discussion/77/gadgets-tech-etc-

dynamiteReady

Shit, sorry AJ! Had my head down. Didn't notice your reply to Maria.

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