Stone Giant Tech Demo (Image heavy)
polycounter lvl 12
This is a tech demo that Belltann and I have been working on here at Fatshark, along with Bitsquid. It is a tech demo for the new features in DX11, shown in the new Bitsquid engine.
The primary focus of the demo is to show of hardware tesselation aswell as improved DoF. I was responsible for creating all environmental assets in the scene and placing them, aswell as lighting some of it. Belltann created the Stone Giant and the Spidery creature. Technical/lighting artist for the demo was Isak Bergh and FX by Staffan Ahlström. Animation by Mikael Hansson
I'm sure Belltann will jump in and post some screens of his own later, WIP images and what not.
Everything was done over the course of a few weeks, at the same time as the engine was being written, so there was alot of testing, trial and error and experimenting to figure out the workflow and pipeline as we went along. Need I say it was a bit stressful and demanding at times
Really interesting working with new tech that you have no idea how it works. I had to unlearn alot of what I knew in order to adapt to the new pipeline and way of thinking. Especially when it came to mesh optimization and topology layout.
The entire demo can be downloaded here: www.stonegiant.se
Youtube-Video: [ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOEDf33AZh4[/ame]
Here are some(many) screens taken inside the demo:
To give you an idea of the kind of tesselation the Bitsquid Engine is capable of, here is the spider-creature in its basic, non-tesselated form, aswell as zoomed in very close to it:
http://www.bitsquid.se/
www.fatshark.se
Enjoy
The primary focus of the demo is to show of hardware tesselation aswell as improved DoF. I was responsible for creating all environmental assets in the scene and placing them, aswell as lighting some of it. Belltann created the Stone Giant and the Spidery creature. Technical/lighting artist for the demo was Isak Bergh and FX by Staffan Ahlström. Animation by Mikael Hansson
I'm sure Belltann will jump in and post some screens of his own later, WIP images and what not.
Everything was done over the course of a few weeks, at the same time as the engine was being written, so there was alot of testing, trial and error and experimenting to figure out the workflow and pipeline as we went along. Need I say it was a bit stressful and demanding at times
Really interesting working with new tech that you have no idea how it works. I had to unlearn alot of what I knew in order to adapt to the new pipeline and way of thinking. Especially when it came to mesh optimization and topology layout.
The entire demo can be downloaded here: www.stonegiant.se
Youtube-Video: [ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOEDf33AZh4[/ame]Here are some(many) screens taken inside the demo:
To give you an idea of the kind of tesselation the Bitsquid Engine is capable of, here is the spider-creature in its basic, non-tesselated form, aswell as zoomed in very close to it:
http://www.bitsquid.se/
www.fatshark.se
Enjoy
Replies
Very nice job guys
Are there any other projects currently working with this engine? Or are there any plans for future projects already set?
Darnit, I need to upgrade to Win 7!
Good job u guys ^^
me loves the dof too
I would LOVE to see my models displayed in the game engine. Any chance to see a free toolbox like Marmoset in the future? ;D
Also it is nice to see some Swedes working on it
-Quick, small, unimportant funfact:
In terms of DOF, at least with a real world camera, if you are focussed on something that is over 20 feet away, there is zero DOF because you are focused into infinity.
Some of the shots are hard to tell the scale because of this, it looks like a miniature. BUT that doesn't mean it isn't kick ass and looks beautiful! Plus I understand the point is to show off DOF so I can suspend reality and enjoy the pretty visuals.
But there is a youtube video up there?
@sXe Seany
We have projects planned, but I can´t say any more than that
@Chclve
Well the biggest differene is that now every triangle counts so much more than before, since they are being tesselated to such an insane degree, you have to remove every unneccessary tringle posible to maximize performance. Also since it is being tesselated you have to have evenly sized quads/tris in the basemesh to get the best and cleanest tesselation. So no more single quad house walls
@3DRyan
Everything but the Stone Giant himself was done from scratch. Belltann used his Dominance War entry as a base for the giant. But to be fair he basically had to redo the entire giant anyway, more than once hehe.
@Simon
This isnt actually the Diesel Engine, its a completely new one, done from scratch. But Tobias an Niklas are still behind it
@Fishypants
You are absolutely right. The DoF is not correct in most of these screens. I went for more "coolness" rather than realism
Glad you all like it!
This image intrigues me. A lot. are the tiles modeled in the floor, or as floaters, or are they being made via some parralax map or a heightmap or something? Same goes for the closeup of the giant's hand and the bug's zoomed in shot.
I thought tesselation worked like a meshsmooth/turbosmooth so i'm wondering how it get this extra detail instead of becoming really rounded. Do you need really high poly base meshes?
How many polies are there in one bug?
We use Displacement maps to displace the tesselated geometry. Just like you would do with a regular renderer like Mentalray or Renderman
As for the floortiles. They are separate meshes with displacement map applied to remove their lowpoly look.
Yes, I know, I still miss it though
I'm looking forward to see what a full game done with this engine will look like
Do you run into problems using displacement and normal maps on the same meshes?
Any weird issues with normal maps conflicting displacement info for lighting?
I can't run the demo at the moment, so how does the lighting workis it baked lightmaps everywhere, or is the lighting dynamic?
Are there any problems with popping when the meshes are tesselated as they get close to the camera?
Do the displaced areas self-shadow?
We make sure the info in the normalmap and displacement map match as closely as possible, so they complement each other instead of working against.
It's all dynamic lighting.
As for the tesselation, it is based on screenspace so each triangle is occupying about 8 pixels on the screen at any given time. So there is no popping, the tesselation is dynamically increased as you get closer and closer to the object. Hope that makes sense?
At the moment we only have the base meshes casting shadow, but it is possible to have the tesselated geometry cast shadows, at the cost of performance ofcourse.
Are you excited for tessellation and the future of game art?
I've seen some tessellation stuff where the houses were still basically flat walls but with floaters for windows + details.
How easy will it be for artists to switch to a tessellation based work flow?
BTW: Screen Space Tesselation = Mind Blowing!
I assume that makes it less CPU/GPU intensive and makes it viable? I don't have a DX11 GPU so I've never seen any DX11 games running in realtime but tesselation looks so intensive, as I understand it is meant to work in a way that your tri count is pretty much the same on your screen regardless of how many objects are on it and how big they are?
It is not locked at any fps. heres a guy running it with quad SLI GTX480 :P
250fps hehe.
[ame]
@felipefrango
Since im just an artist I just know what our engineer told me, but yeah, something like that.
nice vid btw..
nice idea, when the golem took a crystal for the light! also the crystal shading was amazing!
too bad only a few of us can take the advantage of developing with this kind of technique within the next 2 years
i.e. our team is way too small to evaluate this technique besides the standard schedule
I clicked the vid to watch it full screen on youtubes website. On the side bar there were links to other earlier iterations im assuming. A few of them showed what seemed to be the tessellation in action. It would occasionally jump from what one would assume to be the LP scene to the tessellated scene.
My question is what kind of performance hit do you take when this happens? Going from a LP mesh to a tessellated one seems like it would have to have some kinda hickup. Then again my tech knowledge is low.
from what I can tell its the same mesh, no swapping, its just the mesh smoothly get tessellated as you get closer, in the wireframe videos on youtube you can see the edges slowly move in as the mesh tessellates.
This is really impressive.
Never said it was Easy
You guys absolutely have to release an editor for this when it comes out!
You mentioned earlier that you don't have the tessellated stuff casting shadows for performance, if that is turned on is the scene even playable?
I always like to imagine where the next gen stuff is going (ps4, xbox, etc) and these features seem a generational leap ahead of what current consoles can do. But with the big companies extending the life of their consoles, for cost reasons, it seems like this is the tip of the iceberg and tech like this won't become anything more then "just" PC stuff. That combined with the much stronger focus on consoles and web based gaming from developers, it will be interesting to see how long this tech sits and develops on PC with not many games using it, before it gets to everyones living room.