Home Technical Talk

Ready at Dawn's Material system

polycounter lvl 17
Offline / Send Message
bugo polycounter lvl 17
Here's something that our team has been working.

I thought I would share it here:

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/rad/s2013_pbs_rad_slides.pdf

Replies

  • pior
    Offline / Send Message
    pior grand marshal polycounter
    Awesome - the skin scattering alone makes me all happy inside :D Must have been great to have such tech running while working on the assets. Great stuff !!
  • bugo
    Offline / Send Message
    bugo polycounter lvl 17
    Yes, it's extremely exciting! All credits to the peeps at work. Amazing artists and programmers there.
  • Obscura
    Offline / Send Message
    Obscura grand marshal polycounter
    Dat hand pump well.Thanks for sharing!
  • Xoliul
    Offline / Send Message
    Xoliul polycounter lvl 14
    Interesting, but I can't help thinking that Allegorithmic Substance does all that compositing + more. Any reason you decided to go for an in-house solution?
  • Brian "Panda" Choi
    Offline / Send Message
    Brian "Panda" Choi high dynamic range
    I know awesome stuff is happening here, and I want to appreciate it, but I have no clear mathematical understanding of wwhat is going on.

    Man, everytime I talk to graphics engineers from the studios working on this sort of stuff, my mind just goes kaputz.

    Though, I CAN see the SSS is kicking in like a mule.
  • AlecMoody
    Offline / Send Message
    AlecMoody ngon master
    Xoliul wrote: »
    Interesting, but I can't help thinking that Allegorithmic Substance does all that compositing + more. Any reason you decided to go for an in-house solution?

    The base materials that propagate onto your objects are a lot more advanced than simple d/s/n/g materials.
  • Xoliul
    Offline / Send Message
    Xoliul polycounter lvl 14
    AlecMoody wrote: »
    The base materials that propagate onto your objects are a lot more advanced than simple d/s/n/g materials.

    That's what I was thinking, but they're not explaining any of it. Care to elaborate a bit more?
    Does it multiply additional values into your maps? Does it create additional (hidden) composite value maps other than the actual texture composites?
    It's hard to tell what's happening exactly with so little info.
  • JoscelinFrost
    This is brilliant, and very generous to share as the game is currently in development. Kudos to you and the rest of the team! I can honestly say this game even though no gameplay (to my knowledge) has been shown yet is pretty much the reason why I'm considering buying a PS4. Keep up the good work!
  • Ghostscape
    Offline / Send Message
    Ghostscape polycounter lvl 13
    Xoliul wrote: »
    That's what I was thinking, but they're not explaining any of it. Care to elaborate a bit more?
    Does it multiply additional values into your maps? Does it create additional (hidden) composite value maps other than the actual texture composites?
    It's hard to tell what's happening exactly with so little info.

    Here's the full course page from SIGGRAPH:
    http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/
    and the course notes provide additional information:
    http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/rad/s2013_pbs_rad_notes.pdf

    There's a 4 channel composite map in the slides that holds occlusion, anisotrophy, BRDF, and roughness values.

    Additionally, by tying everything into our own database system, we are able to make global, sweeping changes and have them propagate through inheritance. I'm not personally familiar with Substance Designer's workflow, and maybe this can be automated through their workflow, but being able to tweak a property of base gold and have it propagate to 5, 50, or 500 assets and maps through a data rebuild automatically is a huge advantage for ensuring global consistency.
  • Ace-Angel
    Offline / Send Message
    Ace-Angel polycounter lvl 12
    I know I shouldn't be saying this, to detract from the awesome piece of paper you guys put out.

    Buuut, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING ON THE LAST PAGE?!
  • Snefer
    Offline / Send Message
    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Really awesome stuff. Soo, if I am understanding this correctly, there is alot of texturefetches per material right?
  • MeshModeler
    Offline / Send Message
    MeshModeler polycounter lvl 11
    how is mari not crashing with all those material types!?
  • Ghostscape
    Offline / Send Message
    Ghostscape polycounter lvl 13
    Ace-Angel wrote: »
    I know I shouldn't be saying this, to detract from the awesome piece of paper you guys put out.

    Buuut, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING ON THE LAST PAGE?!

    [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Accoutrements-12293-Squirrel-Mask/dp/B0070QMUN2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374873018&sr=8-1&keywords=squirrel+mask"]Amazon.com: Squirrel Mask: Clothing[/ame]
    with a scarf, on a mannequin :D

    Snefer, the compositing is an offline process that bakes and packs data down to a handful of maps - the slides show the breakdown of each channel of the 4 maps - D/N/S and then a special 4-channel map with a bunch of material values in it. You can have an arbitrarily layered compositing material (such as the well pump in the slides) and it bakes down to the same number of maps.

    With a run-time layered environment material, obviously, you can be blending between several different materials and pay the cost for each, but that's no different than any other blend material. The big win for our run-time layered materials compared to the sorts of vertex blend materials you might make in Unreal is that our system is built off our database with inheritance, so we could (and do) have a universal water, universal mortar, and 30 different brick materials, and wind up with 30 different brick+mortar+water materials. If we then decide we want the water to be brown, or the mortar to be smoother, we can make that change in the universal material, and have it propagate to all 30 brick+water+mortar materials.

    I believe the material compositing and layering isn't really more or less texture dependent than a similarly robust end-result (ie, if you wanted the various rendering features, such as map-controlled roughness, BRDF, etc), the win is in the fact that it all retains a modular, component-driven system wherein the elements can be edited in isolation and recombined by the software.
  • Jerc
    Offline / Send Message
    Jerc interpolator
    Ghostscape wrote: »
    but being able to tweak a property of base gold and have it propagate to 5, 50, or 500 assets and maps through a data rebuild automatically is a huge advantage for ensuring global consistency.
    This is indeed the workflow Substance Designer allows you to follow. We are going through pretty much the exact same process with some developers.
    Kudos for recreating it in-house though :)
  • s6
    Offline / Send Message
    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    This is awesome! Makes me so excited to work on next gen console games :)
  • Alberto Rdrgz
    Offline / Send Message
    Alberto Rdrgz polycounter lvl 9
    how is mari not crashing with all those material types!?

    this is our own, material editor. mari is used separately to create the maps.

    With a run-time layered environment material, obviously, you can be blending between several different materials and pay the cost for each, but that's no different than any other blend material.

    not necessarily, the smasher will still crush it to one single material, albeit more expensive. but, still one single draw call.
  • Ark
    Offline / Send Message
    Ark polycounter lvl 11
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wIgmEch1P8"]Ready At Dawn Textile Scanning Acquisition - YouTube[/ame]
  • marks
    Offline / Send Message
    marks greentooth
    There's some further information here:
    http://mynameismjp.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/siggraph-follow-up/

    Interestingly, I also hear that Mari has "almost completely replaced Photoshop" for them :)
  • bugo
    Offline / Send Message
    bugo polycounter lvl 17
    marks wrote: »
    There's some further information here:
    http://mynameismjp.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/siggraph-follow-up/

    Interestingly, I also hear that Mari has "almost completely replaced Photoshop" for them :)

    Yes and no. I still use photoshop! :P
  • DInusty
    Offline / Send Message
    DInusty polycounter lvl 17
    i'd love to see an albedo of the final bake down. pretty nice stuff though guys! nice work. hit me up if you need another enviro guy :P
  • Bigjohn
    Offline / Send Message
    Bigjohn polycounter lvl 11
    So what do I need to know in order to be able to read all that math? I keep seeing that type of stuff in PDFs about rendering, and I never know wtf it means. How do I make sense of it?
  • passerby
    Offline / Send Message
    passerby polycounter lvl 12
    Bigjohn wrote: »
    So what do I need to know in order to be able to read all that math? I keep seeing that type of stuff in PDFs about rendering, and I never know wtf it means. How do I make sense of it?


    mostly vector math, linear algebra, and some working knowldge of a shader or programming language.
  • Ged
    Offline / Send Message
    Ged interpolator
    very interesting! great result! I saw the mention of using vertex colours to define where the four textures go, so theres only ever 4 variations on each object? and is that done in engine or in mari or 3dsmax or something? Eventually all of this stuff done with materials on that pump is baked down to diffuse, normal, specular and reflection mask before the game plays?
  • marks
    Offline / Send Message
    marks greentooth
    So RAD guys, I'm curious as to how much of your composited layering shader setup you have directly integrated into Mari (obviously being able to see realtime results while painting masks for the material templates is better than not). Or are the masks painted 'blind' in Mari just as greyscale on the geo and then used to composite inside your proprietary material compositing tool?
    If a lot of it has been integrated inside Mari, how difficult did you find that process (I understand Mari is supposed to be quite easy to implement new shader models etc) ?
  • iniside
    Offline / Send Message
    iniside polycounter lvl 6
    Jerc wrote: »
    This is indeed the workflow Substance Designer allows you to follow. We are going through pretty much the exact same process with some developers.
    Kudos for recreating it in-house though :)

    The workflow might be similiar, but I believe the end result is completly diffrent. Substance Designer essentialy generate textures, that you have to plug into your own material.

    Material = Shader (for most cases anyway).

    The material system they are using is not generating static textures they are using in materials (shaders), but material it self is generating texture.
    I think this approach resembles much more what is done in offline rendering, where you composite diffrent, often very simple textures (often they are simple masks, that sole prupose is the where are what colors and other properties) to get the final effect.
    The compsiting/procedural generation of final images inside shaders will more often used as we move towards PBR, as good lighting will mask most of tiling issues.
  • Jerc
    Offline / Send Message
    Jerc interpolator
    The final materials are either composited before or inside of the shader itself but you still need to create the base material definitions which are comprised of textures (color, normal, roughness, etc). The workflow is similar, but you use a different environment and technique to composite everything in the end.

    I'd be curious to know if the final material gets baked offline as a set of textures or if the compositing is still computed live ingame ?
  • marks
    Offline / Send Message
    marks greentooth
    Jerc wrote: »
    I'd be curious to know if the final material gets baked offline as a set of textures or if the compositing is still computed live ingame ?

    According to the SIGGRAPH notes, the material gets baked offline during their build process as a set of textures/texture channels comprising the material's BRDF parameters.
  • duke
    Offline / Send Message
    duke polycounter lvl 13
    Would love to get more info on the capture rig - any more info on the automation computer? I'd totally DIY one of these if I knew a bit more!
  • ffm32206600
    Offline / Send Message
    ffm32206600 polycounter lvl 7
    hello my friend .
    i could u plz help me how can i find where can i use material composite system in mari texturing workflow.
    is it in maya or mari?
    is that a script?
    can u give me more information about that.iv read you pdf in siggraph but i culdnt fine it where can i fine and use it.
    tnx very much

  • oglu
    Offline / Send Message
    oglu polycount lvl 666
    why do you need mari.? is there a special reason.?

    cause substance painter would be easier and cheaper... and you could do the same... except you need a massive amount of udims...
Sign In or Register to comment.