Intro duction xv
coauthors describe a simple solution to computing bent normals as a byproduct
of screen-space ambient occlusion. This recovers some directional information of
the otherwise fully decoupled occlusion and lighting computation. The authors
further extend bent normals to bent cones, which not only store the average
direction of incident light, but also the opening angle. When preconvolving dis-
tant lighting, this results in physically more plausible lighting at the speed and
simplicity of ambient occlusion.
The chapter “Physically Based Area Lights,” by Michal Drobot, discusses
the lighting approach used in the Playstation 4 exclusive launch title Killzone:
Shadow Fall from Guerrilla Games. The author went beyond the energy pre-
serving model implementation and focused on accurate area light representation
needed, for example, for realistic specular reflections of the Sun. Area lights
are almost a necessity for effective work with the new energy preserving lighting
models, as these don’t allow artists to fake bright and wide specular lobes any
more.
“High Performance Outdoor Light Scattering Using Epipolar Sampling,” by
Egor Yusov, describes the efficient solution for rendering large scale Sun-lit at-
mospheres. The author uses epipolar sampling and 1D min-max shadow maps to
accelerate the rendering process.
The next chapter, “Hi-Z Screen-Space Cone-Traced Reflections,” by Yasin
Uludag, describes the fast screen-space real-time reflections system used in the
game Mirror’s Edge. Uludag uses ideas from cone tracing to produce plausible
reflections for any surface roughness as well as hierarchical Z-buffers to accelerate
the ray marching pass.
“TressFX: Advanced Real-Time Hair Rendering,” by Timothy Martin, Wolf-
gang Engel, Nicolas Thibieroz, Jason Yang, and Jason Lacroix, discusses tech-
niques used for hair rendering in the Tomb Raider. The authors cover individual
conservative hair rasterization and antialiasing, transparency sorting using linked
lists, as well as lighting and shadowing of the hair volume.
“Wire Antialiasing,” by Emil Persson, focuses on the very specific problem of
antialiasing and lighting of wire meshes (such as telephone cables).
The chapter “Real-Time Lighting via Light Linked List,” by Abdul Bezrati,
discusses an extension to the deferred lighting approach used at Insomniac Games.
The algorithm allows us to properly shade both opaque and translucent surfaces
of a scene in an uniform way. The algorithm manages linked lists of lights affecting
each pixel on screen. Each shaded pixel then can read this list and compute the
appropriate lighting and shadows.
The next two chapters describe techniques used in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black
Flag from Ubisoft. “Deferred Normalized Irradiance Probes,” by John Huelin,
Benjamin Rouveyrol, and Bart lomiej Wro´nski, describes the global illumination
with day–night cycle support. The authors take time to talk about various tools
and runtime optimizations that allowed them to achieve very quick turnaround
time during the development.