HOW CRYENGINE 3 AND AMD GCN

ARCHITECTURE GAVE BIRTH TO A

RED GEM: "PROJECT PHOENIX"

Bill Bilodeau
Developer Relations Engineer
AMD

Kedhrin Gonzalez
Creative Director
Illfonic

Sean Tracy
Senior Field Applications Engineer
Crytek

Dongsoo Han
Software Research Engineer
AMD
 Creating A New Ruby

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CREATING A NEW RUBY

Re-imagining an icon
Ruby in the past
New design
Cinematic Feel
Established Partners
Making a game cinematic
Authoring Tools
Tools Used
TressFX
Leveraging Technology
CryENGINE 3
Mesh Tessellation

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RE-IMAGINING AN ICON | RUBY IN THE PAST

Ruby through the ages

Showcasing new technology
Anime Style

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RE-IMAGINING AN ICON | NEW DESIGN

New Design
Modern look and design
Realistic combat ready Ruby
Based off realism
Showcase materials and tech

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RE-IMAGINING AN ICON | NEW DESIGN

Showcase Materials and Lighting

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CINEMATIC FEEL | ESTABLISHED PARTNERS

The Graphic Film Company

Simon West Directed
Experienced Film Team
Editing, Cinematography, and Animation
Support

Digital Domain
Body Motion Capture
Facial Motion Capture

Art Bully Productions

Outsourced Character Models
87Eleven
Stunts and Fight Scenes

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 CINEMATIC FEEL | MAKING A GAME CINEMATIC

Make a game first, cinematic second

Environment built like a game
Focusing on Next Gen
High pixel density assets
Detailed Backgrounds
Assets that can be reused
New techniques

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 AUTHORING TOOLS | TOOLS USED

Tools Used
3D Studio Max, Maya, Mudbox,
Crazybump, nDo 2, dDo, Zbrush,
Photoshop, Illustrator, Motionbuilder,
Shave and a Haircut
Full Body Motion Capture
Facial Motion Capture
CryENGINE 3

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 AUTHORING TOOLS | TRESS FX

Tress FX
Created hair in Maya using Shave and a Haircut
Convert strands to NURB curves
Export with Python script
Import to Engine and finish settings

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 LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY | CRYENGINE 3

Complete Toolset
Lighting
Animation
FX
Materials
Rapid Development
Deployment from authoring tools
Flexible Pipeline

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 LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY | MESH TESSELLATION

Mesh Tessellation
Gain Depth
Planning for Phong
Planning for Displacement

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CRYENGINE 3 FEATURES
LEVERAGED FOR PROJECT
PHOENIX "RUBY"

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CRYENGINE FEATURES LEVERAGED FOR RUBY

Applied Lighting Technology

Real-Time Area Lights with texture reflection
Composite 3d Lens Flares and FX
Spherical and Box Projected Image Based Lighting
Innovations in Shading and Rendering
Screen Space Directional Occlusion SSDO
Real-Time Local Reflections RLR
Anti Aliasing for Ruby
Eye Shader
Tessellation and Displacement
Displacement Mapping
Phong

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

Real-Time Area Lights with texture reflection

Light sources in videogames are usually simulated analytically via an infinitely small point light source
or directional light source when projection is required.
This is a fairly good approximation for most cases, but in the real world light can come from anywhere
and has a volume, this affects shadows and light reflection appearance.
Many situations in Ruby when light sources cannot be simple points.
Billboards, Neon Lamps, Translucent materials

Too many point lights required to simulate these effects!

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

Point Lights Area Lights

Point lights cast infinitely Sharp shadows. Area Light is a light that has volume.
Real Shadows never look so sharp. Its shadow starts sharp near to the object but
CryENGINE uses shadow maps which allows blurs more and more at distance.
them to be slightly blurred with a fixed width. Much more physically plausible

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

For the Ruby Project, the real-time area lights are used for artificial lighting, when the actual light sources
are so large that their point-specular highlights would become a visual issue.

Area Light Highlight and Texture Reflection Point Light Specular Highlight

Note the difference in specular highlight shape

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

Texture reflection and shape control

The Ruby project also contains materials that are quite smooth and glossy as the environment is wet
and in the rain.
Area Lights are quite noticeable in this situation with the shape control over the specular highlights
and with accurate texture reflection.

Area Light Texture Reflection

Point Light Helper Shape

Area Light Helper Shape

Area Light Helper Shape

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

3d Composite Lens Flares

Procedural Flares seem great, but in
practice we need Artistic Input!
A usual solution for such challenges is
to hardcode a couple cases and thats
it.
We created something much more user
friendly and to help each project have
its own look without a programmer
having to write anything new.
In Ruby, most key-lights are able to
produce flares, orbs, streaks and other
kind of visual aberrations due to the
scratches and irregularities on the lens.

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

3d Composite Lens Flares

Composite Flare with 3 Sub Effects Composite Flare with 1 Sub Effects

Composite Flare with 2 Sub Effects No Flares

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

Image Based Lighting IBL

IBL is a rendering technique where complex lighting is stored in a environment map which is projected
onto the scene.
Positive points:
High quality
Fast for many lights and even a complex environment is reflected
Energy preserving specular power
Negative points
Works only well for local positions with distant emitters and reflection content
Static content only
In the CryENGINE IBL implementation diffuse lighting can be approximated very well by convolving an
environment map (diffuse convolution) which is stored as a cube map again. Because of bilinear filtering,
the texture can be quite low resolution as seen here.
Hard specular reflections are simple as a single texture lookup in the mirrored eye direction gives the
lighting in that direction

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

Depending on the light probe, the lighting can be more ambient or harsh or even colored. The following
images show some examples (including sun which casts shadow)

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APPLIED LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY

Box Projected Image Based Lighting IBL

Essential to the ruby demo was an advancement made for IBL probes called box projected IBL.
This is a good technique for flat mirrors.
In the Ruby demo this is how we achieving very accurate reflections without scrolling or rotating the
IBL probe.

Box Projection More Accurate Spherical Projection Less Accurate

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SHADING AND RENDERING

Screen Space Directional Occlusion

Contact Shadows or Screen Space Directional Occlusion (SSDO) is a novel technique developed for
Crysis 2.
SSDO is more physically correct than our former technique SSAO.
We came up with a new implementation which is efficient enough to allow contact shadows to be applied from every
light source in the world
SSDO can also help fixing self-shadowing issues and greatly improves the global lighting quality, especially when
many different objects interact with each other from a lighting standpoint.

SSDO OFF SSDO ON

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SHADING AND RENDERING

Screen Space Directional Occlusion

SSDO provides smooth free contact shadows that are especially noticeable when using ambient
deferred lights which do not cast traditional shadow.
It retains the color information and applies it to the contact shadow.
Red and Blue Light is seen here bleeding into each other for Purple Contact Shadows
SSDO Off SSDO On

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SHADING AND RENDERING

Real time Local reflections

Reflections are one of the biggest challenges to solve efficiently in real-time rendering, particularly for
deferred rendering/lighting based engines.
We introduced a novel approach we call real-time local reflections (RLR).
RLR is a screen space approximation to ray-traced HDR reflections, from and on all objects on screen.
We use a ray marching technique combined with blur and jitter to disguise low sample counts.
Although the results are not always perfect this technique allows for any kind of curved surface in the scene to
efficiently reflect the nearby surroundings in real time, including self-reflections which are not possible with cube
maps or planar reflections.

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SHADING AND RENDERING

Real time Local reflections

Currently uses 9 ray marched samples but was increased to 32 for Ruby as GCN Hardware manages
the high sample count quite well because of efficient flow control hardware.
Can be increased further as hardware becomes even more powerful.

RLR Off RLR On @ 32 Samples

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SHADING AND RENDERING

Anti Aliasing
The latest engine iteration introduces the richest set of Anti aliasing options ever available within the
CryENGINE.
Anti-Aliasing and its effectiveness can vary from user to user as some prefer a very sharp image, whilst others prefer
a blurrier image.
CryENGINE gives developers and their players all of the most effective and technically sophisticated
modes to suit their preferences. Each mode has very different implications in terms of overall
performance, quality and sharpness.
The CryENGINE now supports the following anti-aliasing techniques with user controlled settings for
number of samples and overall quality per mode.
FXAA (Fast-Aproximate Antialiasing)
SMAA (Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing)
MSAA (the foundation DX11 support for SMAA)
And also no AA, since surprisingly some users prefer no AA at all.

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SHADING AND RENDERING

Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing FXAA

This is the mode with the best performance of the pack, while offering fairly reasonable image quality.
Its a post process solution, hence it doesnt tackle any sub pixel information, some shimmering might
be noticeable on slow camera movements due to lack of sub pixel movement.

No AA FXAA

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SHADING AND RENDERING

Improved Eye Shader

The new eye shader uses Iris Parallax Mapping by default. The old alpha-blended method has been
deprecated as it doesn't work with deferred lighting.
Luckily, fixing the assets requires very little work.
The new shader was designed with merged textures in mind (character head texture contains eyes and overlay in the
same texture).

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TESSELLATION

Tessellation and Displacement

One of the most important updates provided by the DirectX 11 API was the introduction of
Programmable Hardware Tessellation.
With the improvements to tessellation artists working on Ruby no longer had to go through a process
of pre-tessellated their assets before seeing them in engine, thus allowing them to set tessellation in
real-time by clicking a checkbox on a per-material basis
Displacement mapping
Tessellates the mesh uniformly and Reads a displacement height map to extrude the vertices.
Phong
Phong is an approximation technique designed to smooth, based on vertex normals. The only drawback is that the
surface is not perfectly smoothed across patch boundaries and can look a bit inflated.
All Tessellations Schemes are now adaptive mitigating the cost on a per patch basis of all tessellated
meshes.

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TESSELLATION

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TESSELLATION

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 TressFX HAIR TECHNOLOGY
IN THE RUBY DEMO

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RUBY HAIR | TressFX

Realistic hair rendering and simulation

Also used in Tomb Raider
Goes beyond simple shells and fins representation used in games
Hair is rendered as actual strands with self shadowing, antialiasing and
transparency
Physical simulation using GPU compute shaders
Very flexible to allow for different hair styles and different conditions

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RUBY HAIR RENDERING | TressFX

What goes into good hair?

Anti-aliasing
Volumetric self shadowing
Transparency
Thousands of individual hair strands
Tessellation not necessary
Based on I3D 2012 paper from AMD
A Framework for Rendering Complex
Scattering Effects on Hair, Yang, et al.
Algorithms modified for improved
real-time performance
Anti-Aliasing + Volume Shadows + Transparency

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RUBY HAIR RENDERING | TressFX

Kajiya Hair Lighting Model

Anisotropic hair strand lighting model
Uses the tangent along the strand instead of the normal for light reflections
Instead of cos(N, H) , use sin(T,H)
Marschner Model
Two specular highlights
Primary light colored highlight shifted towards the tip
Secondary hair colored highlight shifted towards the root

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Anti-Aliasing

Every hair strand is anti-aliased manually

Not using Hardware MSAA!

Compute pixel coverage on edges of hair strands

and convert it to an alpha value

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RUBY HAIR RENDERING | TressFX Self Shadowing

Self Shadowing
Uses a simplified Deep Shadow Map technique

No Self Shadows With Self Shadows

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RUBY HAIR RENDERING | TressFX Transparency

Order Independent Transparency (OIT) using a Per-Pixel Linked Lists (PPLL)

Fragments are stored in link lists on the GPU
Nearest K fragments are sorted and used for rendering

No Transparency With Transparency

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 TressFX HAIR SIMULATION
IN THE RUBY DEMO

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RUBY HAIR SIMULATION | TressFX Physics Simulation

Hair strand is represented as polylines with vertices and edges

LC(Length constraints) is for inextensible hair.
Efficient global and local shape constraints to simulate various hair styles
GSC(Global shape constraints) help preserve hair style and initial shape
It can guarantee that initial hair style can be restored even after strong agitations
LSC(Local shape constraints)
For bending/twisting forces to support various hair styles i.e. straight, curly or wavy
Stable time integration with Verlet method
Collision detection and response between hair and model using capsules

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RUBY HAIR SIMULATION | TressFX Physics Simulation

The most difficult part of simulation was to figure out how to simulate stylized hair.
In other words, how to hold curly hair shape?
To do it, bending and twisting forces are crucial.
As in robotics, an open-chain structure has joints and each joint has parent-child
relationships to its connected joints.
With local transforms in chain structure, we can get a global transform

We find goal positions using local/global transforms for each

vertex and update vertex position by interpolating it using
stiffness value.

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RUBY HAIR SIMULATION | TressFX Physics Simulation

Hair can be assigned to the different groups

Allows different simulation parameters such as stiffness and damping
Fine tuning mechanism for users
Various hair conditions can be simulated such as wet or heavy on the fly
A simple aerodynamics for wind
All simulation is processed inside GPU using Compute Shader in DX11
Mixed hair vertex and strand level parallel processes utilize GPU architecture efficiently.
By combining with vertex instancing, the actual simulated number of hair can be lower guide hairs

dry wet

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REFERENCES

Xuan Yu, Jason C. Yang, Justin Hensley, Takahiro Harada, and Jingyi Yu, A Framework for
Rendering Complex Scattering Effects on Hair, I3D 2012.
Dongsoo Han and Takahiro Harada, Real-time Hair Simulation with Efficient Hair Style
Preservation, VRIPHYS 2012 .
J. Kajiya and T. Kay. Rendering Fur with Three Dimensional Textures, SIGGRAPH 89
Conference Proceedings, pp 271-280, 1989
Stephen R. Marshner, Henrik Wann Jensen, Mike Cammarano, Steve Worley, and Pat
Hanrahan, Light Scattering from Human Hair Fibers, In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2003.
TressFX rendering implementation by Karl Hillesdale, Research Engineer, AMD.

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ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

. Hayward, K, "Reflections with Billboard Imposters",

http://graphicsrunner.blogspot.de/2008/04/reflections-with-billboard-impostors.html
. Huang, X. "Think DirectX11 Tessellation! Lots of Options", GDC 2010 (link:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27397 (batch link together with tittle name)) .
BEHC "Box Projected Cubemap Environment Mapping" ,
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/568829-box-projected-cubemap-environment-mapping/
. McDonald, J. "Tessellation on Any Budget", GDC 2011 (
http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Tessellation_On_Any_Budget-GDC2011.pps)
. Kasyan, N. , Schulz, N., Sousa, T. "Secrets of the CryENGINE 3 Graphics Technology", Siggraph 2011
(link: http://www.crytek.com/download/S2011_SecretsCryENGINE3Tech.ppt)
. Lagarde, S. "Local Image Based Lighting With Parallax Corrected Cubemaps", Siggraph 2012 (link:
http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/siggraph-2012-talk/)
. Sousa, T. , Wenzel, C. , Raine, C. "The Rendering Technologies of Crysis 3", GDC 2013

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QUESTIONS?

For follow-up questions, email:

bill.bilodeau@amd.com
seanp@crytek.com
kedhrin@illfonic.com

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 Disclaimer & Attribution
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The information contained herein is subject to change and may be rendered inaccurate for many reasons, including but not limited
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[For AMD-speakers only] 2013 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

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Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the content herein and no endorsements are implied.

IllFonic and the IllFonic logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of IllFonic, LLC throughout the world.
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 Trademark Attribution
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States
and/or other jurisdictions. Other names used in this presentation are for identification purposes only and may be
trademarks of their respective owners.

2013 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved.

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