Next gen techniques, best practice, PS4, Xbox 420, Nintendo

littleclaude · Feb 2013

Can you share your thoughts and WIP screen shots for best practice on the subject of next gen techniques?

Now that we are getting to grips with the tech how are you finding it best to adopting modular creation or are you starting to pump out larger sections , for example, 4X chamfered edges, blended textures, procedural shaders and so on?

Also best techniques for

Reflections, Particles, Animated water surface, Wet material shading, Close ups, Depth of Field, Facial expressions, Short scalp hair and beard, Hair, Simple animation, Rather simple shading, Hair, Deferred + MSAA, Subsurface Scattering, Reflections, Depth of Field and so on

Also add any of your WIPs screen shots with wireframes and FPS, also any links and finds that you have would be geat

To start the ball rolling

2011The Technology Behind theDirectX 11 Unreal Engine"Samaritan" Demo
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/DirectX11Rendering/MartinM_GDC11_DX11_presentation.pdf

[ame="

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8&feature=player_embedded"]Unreal Engine 4 - GT.TV Exclusive Development Walkthrough - YouTube[/ame]

[ame="

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZmRt8gCsC0&feature=player_embedded"]Unreal Engine 4 - GT.TV Elemental Demo Showcase - YouTube[/ame]

littleclaude · Feb 2013

Also

http://www.unrealengine.com/files/misc/The_Technology_Behind_the_Elemental_Demo_16x9_%282%29.pdf

littleclaude · Apr 2013

What do you think the polycount is for the average PS4 title like killzone 4

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/02/20/killzone-shadow-fall-announced-for-playstation-4/

Xendance · Apr 2013

Well at least with UE 4 you can build bigger discrete meshes without having to worry about draw calls with dynamic lights because of the deferred lighting in it. And fyi, I believe Epic got rid of their dynamic GI (the voxel one) or something along those lines.

littleclaude · Apr 2013

Can not wait to get my hands on Unreal 4.

And at a guess I would say the Killzone characters look like they are around 35K

[ame="

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn7sj4gmfjY"]Playstation 4: Meeting 2013 Killzone 4 Gameplay Trailer PS4 [HD] - YouTube[/ame]

iniside · Apr 2013

littleclaude wrote: »

What do you think the polycount is for the average PS4 title like killzone 4

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/02/20/killzone-shadow-fall-announced-for-playstation-4/

The same as current ones. Just with tesselation.
If you really want to get nice example of true next-gen character look at Star Citizen. 100k polys.

I guess it depends on how many moveable and sioulethe details there is. You won't give 10k on cloth simulated piece it will kill perfomance.

leleuxart · Apr 2013

Xendance wrote: »

Well at least with UE 4 you can build bigger discrete meshes without having to worry about draw calls with dynamic lights because of the deferred lighting in it. And fyi, I believe Epic got rid of their dynamic GI (the voxel one) or something along those lines.

The last I read was that PS4 wasn't getting SVOGI, but nothing was announced for the next Xbox or PC.

Also, I think a good example of next-gen stuff is current-gen PC, although not everything will make it way to consoles(especially not Nintendo :poly124:). I think Crytek may be leading the way right now. There is a character art dump from Crysis 3 and if I remember correctly, the Nanosuit used a single 4096 and Psycho used 2 2048s and a 1024. Not to mention Screen-Space Directional Occlusion(SSAO + 1 light bounce), their foliage tool, among other things...

rogelio · Apr 2013

As far as I have heard it is the same as current gen with amazing shaders. So lets say you make a stone wall... In fact you can now go cheaper on the main geo mesh since tessellation might do the job for the wall instead of geo sculpting to get an effect of depth. Also When it comes to true reflections on metal and such. You will see alot of gimmicky shader usage just for the hell of it in the first few games and than later you will start to see really well defined shaders. WHen it comes to characters I can imagine about the same just with much better shaders and textures. When it comes to texture memory if might be about the same but it will be used drastically different... more procedural approach. I think modelers need not to worry about next gen. But texture/shader artists are going to get schooled a new one... This will be the biggest change but it will be gradual. People will still use oldish techniques and eventually move forward to newer texture shader techniques. (movie like shader development) You already see glimpse of new techniques being used in games like Halo and Battlefield on current consoles.

Racer445 · Apr 2013

everything is just going to take longer and require more external programs to make

smaller games on pc is where its at

XilenceX · Apr 2013

leleuxart wrote: »

The last I read was that PS4 wasn't getting SVOGI, but nothing was announced for the next Xbox or PC.

Nope there will be no dynamic global illumination in UE4, at least not in the beginning. Here are the quotes from Epic:

Hey guys, rendering team lead from Epic here.

Fully dynamic lighting and precomputed lighting are just two tools in our UE4 toolbox. We have games being made like Fortnite that are using fully dynamic lighting, no lighting build times, and the game has full flexibility to change what it desires at runtime. In the case of Fortnite, this is used to great effect with building and harvesting of resources. We don't yet have a solution for dynamic GI in the fully dynamic lighting path, this is something we hope to address in the future.

On the other hand, using precomputed lighting where you don't need dynamicness frees up a lot of processing power. The infiltrator demo that we released at GDC leverages this heavily. In short: we would have had to scale down Infiltrator massively without precomputing some of the lighting. There are over 1000 lights in some of the scenes, and about half of those cast shadows. Dynamic shadows have a huge cost on graphics hardware, but precomputed shadows are very cheap. Our general purpose reflection method (Reflection Environment) also relies on pre-captured probes. By having the general purpose reflection method be cost efficient, we were able to spend the extra GPU time on Screen Space Reflections, which provides extra detail where it is available (due to screenspace limitations).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bLOi3mo9NE (watch in HD)
Now there are some workflow costs to precomputed lighting (creating lightmap UVs, build time), and this is something we hope to improve significantly in the future.

Precomputed lighting is also really useful for scaling down, to low end PC, 60fps, mobile, etc.

In summary: UE4 supports multiple tiers of lighting options, and games can use what suits them best. Fully dynamic lighting provides maximum interactivity, editor workflow and game design flexibility, precomputed lighting provides maximum quality and performance.

Let me know if you have any specific questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

There have been quite a few improvements to dynamic lighting techniques or methods that work well with dynamic lighting in UE4, over UE3:
Deferred shading everywhere! This is a huge one.
Tiled deferred shading - provides further benefits when many lights are on screen. Over a thousand on-screen in Infiltrator.
Subsurface shadowing of SSS materials
Screen space reflections
Image based lens flares (picks up any bright spot, doesn't need to be preplaced)
SSAO has been improved
CSM is quite a bit faster due to culling
Overall shadow depth rendering is faster, uses position only stream, better organization of vertices for locality
Cubemap ambient term, provides specular in unshadowed areas

But yes, dynamic GI is for sure needed and we'll get to it.

You can read that and a few other interesting bits here:
http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/950908-UE4-will-use-Lightmass-for-its-lighting-system!/page7

Shrike · Apr 2013

Great now we have 2 next gen terms...

littleclaude · Jun 2013

So what is the latest now we have a little more information on the specs.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-gdc-2013-unreal-engine-4

Does this mean light baking will have to be done on PS4 and Xbone? but not on PC?

ZacD · Jun 2013

From what it sounds like, SVOGI was completely removed and all versions of Unreal Engine 4 will rely heavily on light maps. Killzone 4 and the Fox engine aren't using lightmaps though.

teaandcigarettes · Jun 2013

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that they are saying that the lighting/shadow casting will still be fully dynamic. The only thing that will be baked into Lightmaps will be GI and indirect lighting.

This comes from the article:

"The quality of the dynamic lighting is one of the most impressive elements of the Infiltrator demo, but it's not as much of a performance hot-spot as you may imagine."The dynamic lights are not our current performance limit. Our limits come more from the amounts of massive overlapping shadow-casting lights," Willard said. "That's not been a huge challenge because typically we don't need that many to get a perfect-looking scene.""

ZacD · Jun 2013

It's too vague to really tell, they are using a deferred rendering so of course it's going to have basically an unlimited number of dynamic lights, But you cannot have quality baked GI with all of the lighting being dynamic, unless this is some new technique I've never heard of.

Ace-Angel · Jun 2013

Maybe they just used a Lambert term to blend the GI and such pending on the light and normal surface as a sort of ambient self shadowing?

I did this before for UDK, but I don't think it would work for a full environment since it's another separate call, and would require taking into consideration more then simply the diffuse shadowing.

ceebee · Jun 2013

Racer445 wrote: »

everything is just going to take longer and require more external programs to make

smaller games on pc is where its at

Yes. This.

Froyok · Jun 2013

Or we will have more procedural games...

fragfest2012 · Jun 2013

I think that polycount and texture resolution will go up (the guys behind Killzone Shadow Fall Demo at the PS4 demo had a cool presentation). IE, the Killzone characters (KZ3 on PS3 to KZSF on PS4) went from 15k tris and a single 2048 texture to 40k tris and 2 2048 + 1 1024 texture (I think, I might be off a little bit). But, mainly the graphical increase will come from better shaders and better modular techniques. A safe place to start is modern high-end PC specs.

Ashaman73 · Jun 2013

It is just too early to tell it now.

A new console generation is always behind the current PC generation (you need several years to plan and design a new console). There are two factors heavily influencing the games on a console. Hardware utilisation and the lowest common denominator. The whole current game generation suffers under the really old, current console gen, therefor a new console generation will create a leap in this department. Best to look at games which are most PC only, like BF4. This will give a hint to the quality of the PS4 gen console games.

But this will take time until the software engineers will utilise the hardware to this degree (it needed several years for the PS3 gen).

But don't expect some miracles. The hardware leap from PS2 gen to PS3 gen was really huge (from fix-pipeline, single core, CD-Rom to shader, multicore and Blu-ray), whereas the current leap is only in raw power (still shaders, still multi-core, still blu-raw).

AlexCatMasterSupreme · Jun 2013

Xbox 420 blaze it

Kwramm · Jun 2013

Here's a tip from the stuff I see at work in outsourcing: look into physically based shaders and get comfortable working with them and their texture types. Linear workflows will also get more important.
I just hope more tools will support all this soon.

Racer445 · Jun 2013

AlexCatMasterSupreme wrote: »

Xbox 420 blaze it

high res

baked normals

ZacD · Jun 2013

fragfest2012 wrote: »

IE, the Killzone characters (KZ3 on PS3 to KZSF on PS4) went from 15k tris and a single 2048 texture to 40k tris and 2 2048 + 1 1024 texture (I think, I might be off a little bit).

Killzone is going from a single 1024 texture and 10k polys for a character to 6- 2048 textures and 40k polys.

The coolest things about the Killzone demo are image based lighting with real time raytraced reflections.

fragfest2012 · Jun 2013

I forgot to mention that raw numbers of objects will also increase along with much better physics and such.

Next gen techniques, best practice, PS4, Xbox 420, Nintendo

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