Object Space Lighting – following Film rendering 2 decades later in real time
At GDC 2016, I made a presentation on Object Space Lighting. In a nutshell, our rendering architecture is vastly different then many games. In fact, it’s inspired heavily by REYES which was a system created by PIXAR and used for many films. I figure techniques done 15 years ago in film would be good candidates for GPUs now, given Moore’s law.
Many films have moved on to monte-carlo ray tracing techniques now, but REYES can still produce good results and can be done in real time.
I had many discussions at GDC, and curiously I have been told that one of the big difficulties with REYES was dealing with filtering across sample boundaries. However, our implementation requires artists to chart their models so I don’t think this is a huge problem for us. We do our filtering via the stitch map as described in the slide deck.
Anyway, I have been hounded for the slides for the last week or so at GDC, pretty much non stop ;), so here they are.