Electronic Arts Research Division to Showcase 'Global Illumination Based on Surfels' at SIGGRAPH 2021

[ILikeFeet]

Abstract: Global Illumination Based on Surfels (GIBS) is a solution for calculating indirect diffuse illumination in real-time. The solution combines hardware ray tracing with a discretization of scene geometry to cache and amortize lighting calculations across time and space. It requires no pre-computation, no special meshes, and no special UV sets, freeing artists from tedious and time-consuming processes required by traditional solutions. GIBS enables new possibilities in the runtime, allowing for high fidelity lighting in dynamic environments and for user created content, while accommodating content of arbitrary scale. The algorithm is part of the suite of tools available to developers and teams throughout EA as part of the Frostbite engine.

This talk will detail the GIBS algorithm and how surfels are used to enable real-time ray traced global illumination. We will describe how the scene is discretized into surfels on the fly, and why we think this discretization is a good fit for caching lighting operations. The talk will describe the acceleration structure used to enable efficient access to surfel data, and how this structure allows us to cover environments of arbitrary size, while keeping a predictable performance and memory footprint. We will detail how the algorithm handles dynamic objects, skinned characters, and transparency. Several techniques have been developed to efficiently integrate irradiance on surfels. We will describe our use of ray guiding, ray binning, spatial filters, and how we handle scenes with large numbers of lights.

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https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/index.html

Sounds like many of the big publishers are working on a global illumination solution to pair with ray tracing accelerated hardware and for older GPUs as well

 

[Hey Please]

No take, only GIB please.

Hopefully, we will see implementation of this RT supported lighting tech in their current gen exclusive projects like .... ME4 and/or DA.

 

[vixolus]

That scene is from Plants Vs Zombies BFN right? Wonder if they're gonna use that to do some before and after comparisons. Maybe it shines with the art style over something like Battlefield.

 

[McFly]

Nice.

 

[Max|Payne]

Is the future going to be surfels? I want many surfels per texel shader.

 

[BoredLemon]

Sounds like many of the big publishers are working on a global illumination solution to pair with ray tracing accelerated hardware and for older GPUs as well

Click to shrink...

Sounds like it's another way to cache RT results (see DDGI), i don't see anything for older GPUs.

The solution combines hardware ray tracing with a discretization of scene geometry to cache and amortize lighting calculations across time and space.

Click to shrink...

 

[ILikeFeet]

slides have been uploaded. EA mentions it's now a part of Frostbite, so upcoming games may use it

http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/index.html

 

[nolifebr]

http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/SIGGRAPH%20Advances%202021%20-%20Surfel%20GI.pdf

 

[Captjohnboyd]

Pretty interesting stuff. I always enjoy a peek at these behind the scenes concepts.

Off topic but I miss siggraph. It used to be held in New Orleans and I went every year in the late 90's early 00's. It was always a blast. Pretty wild going from their hundred pounds tethered VR demos and blocky arcade games to where we are now

 

[FuturaBold]

A few of the developers work at RIPPLE EFFECT (DICE LA). Perhaps 2042 will use it. I imagine the new Dead Space will have state of the art lighting for sure

 

[Afrikan]

Probably why that Need For Speed *footage* looked so good. 🤷🏾‍♂️

Edit-Whoa 200+ slides in that PDF!

 

[vixolus]

Anyone want to explain the paper like I'm 5? I skimmed it because it's interesting, but graphics engineering is wizardry

 

[ILikeFeet]

Anyone want to explain the paper like I'm 5? I skimmed it because it's interesting, but graphics engineering is wizardry

Click to shrink...

it's a method of global illumination that uses ray tracing and doesn't shoot out a lot of rays (as that is very slow). looks similar to Nvidia's own work with dynamic diffuse GI

https://morgan3d.github.io/articles/2019-04-01-ddgi/

 

[ILikeFeet]

EA has put up the presentation on YouTube

 

[RoboPlato]

Nice! Will watch. Realtime GI is such a big deal for games in both fidelity and dev workflow. I cannot wait to see how it grows this gen

 

[nihilence]

I appreciate all the magic, but understanding all that is wild.

 

[Lukemia SL]

Watching the video now. I really hope this makes it into Dead Space.