EUROGRAPHICS 2006 / E. Gröller and L. Szirmay-Kalos Volume 25 (2006), Number 3 (Guest Editors) Official Sponsors Graphics meets Games M. Wimmer, T. Aila (editors) MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories ISSN 1017-4656 Impressum c 2006 The Eurographics Association ISSN 1017-4656 Produced by: Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms Technical University Vienna, A-1040, Austria Cover Design: Katharina Bruckner Print Preparation: Georg Zotti, TU Vienna September 4–8, 2006 Vienna, Austria Graphics meets Games Preface These proceedings contain abstracts of all the items presented in the “Graphics meets Games” track at Eurographics 2006, the 27th Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics, held in the buildings of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria, between the 4th and the 8th of September 2006. Digital games have paved the way for computer graphics to become a mainstream technology. Con- versely, computer graphics has elevated digital games to a popularity never seen before. Eurographics acknowledges this fact by dedicating a whole new program track to the interface between these two disciplines. Read on to learn more about the very first “Graphics meets Games” program, including special in- dustry talks, a panel, physical games, and an exciting competition! We would like to extend our special gratitude to Markus Giegl, who took care of the Graphics meets Games competition, NVIDIA and the European GameTools project for sponsoring the prizes for the competition, and Georg Zotti for his unrelenting efforts to get the proceedings you hold in your hand into print. Vienna, August 2006 Michael Wimmer, Timo Aila EG 2006 Graphics meets Games Co-Chairs Published by The Eurographics Association ISSN 1017–4656 Graphics meets Games Track 1: Talks Listen to well-known game community professionals in special game industry sessions, as they talk about new industry challenges and technologies at the interface between research and game development. Graphics meets Games Session 1 Collada Remi Arnaud – Sony Computer Entertainment Abstract Speaker’s Bio Remi joined the US is a royalty free stan- R&D department at dard 3D asset exchange format. Fostered by Sony Sony Computer En- Computer Entertainment to raise the quality of con- tertainment as Graph- tent and tools for consoles such as the PLAYSTA- ics Architect in 2003, TION 3 console, it is now an industry standard in where he designs the Khronos Group, also home of OpenGL, OpenGL PS3 graphics API ES. COLLADA has made quite a journey in its 3 and tools, such as years of existence. It is supported by all major DCC PSGL and COL- tools (3dsMax, Maya, XSI, Blender, ..) both in ex- LADA. Remi has a port and import, and used by many game develop- long experience in ers on all platforms. It is used as intermediate for- API and tools for mat by many game engines, such as Unreal Engine, real-time graphics, C4 Engine, OGRE, and has advanced features such since he obtained his as shader FX and Physics, supported by specialized PhD in ‘Real-Time tools and libraries (FXComposer 2.0, AGEIA PhysX, image Synthesis’ in 1994 while he was working in Bullet,..), that are essential to nowaday’s content, but the R&D department of Thomson Training & Sim- unfortunately not available in any other standard ex- ulation designing Space Magic, a visual systems for change format. This talk will provide all the infor- civil and military applications. He moved to the USA mation needed to take advantage of this technology, in 1996 and worked for Silicon Graphics, working and provide some insights on its usage on the PS3. high-end features to IRIS Performer, a multi proces- sor optimized scene graph. He then decided to be more adventurous and co-founded Intrinsic Graphics and co-designed the Alchemy cross-platform game engine, which is now owned by Activision. 2 Graphics meets Games Session 2 Gelato: Film Rendering on Game Hardware Eric Enderton – NVidia Abstract Speaker’s Bio High-quality off-line rendering can be accelerated Eric Enderton has been with standard graphics hardware by using the hard- a leader in rendering and ware in somewhat non-standard ways. Since visibil- animation software for ity must be sampled at high rates in space and time, visual effects since 1990, shading is sampled in parameter space rather than when he joined Indus- screen space. To support displacement efficiently, trial Light & Magic as bounding box visibility queries are intermixed with their first full-time com- rendering. Transparency uses depth peeling. The re- puter graphics software sulting modified Reyes algorithm is implemented in engineer. His projects the NVIDIA Gelato renderer. there included the orig- Even so, film frames take minutes or hours, while inal NURBS stitching game frames render at over 30 Hz. However, the first program for Termina- frame of a game takes much longer. The problem tor 2 and ILM’s first is that every film frame is a first frame. Accelerated GUI lighting software for relighting is one solution we have implemented. Jurassic Park. He also founded and managed ILM’s production engineer- ing group. Eric went on to consult at several major film studios before joining NVIDIA in 2003, where he is a principal software engineer on Gelato, the first GPU-accelerated final frame renderer. Eric has degrees in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. 3 Graphics meets Games Session 3: Game Architectures Using Direct3D10 Peter-Pike Sloan – Microsoft Abstract Speaker’s Bio Direct3D10 is the most recent evolution of graph- Peter-Pike Sloan has been in the Di- ics hardware/API and includes significant changes. rectX group at Microsoft for the past This talk will discuss the latest version of the shad- four years. Prior to that he was ing model (4.0), new pipeline stages like the geome- a member of the graphics group in try shader and other changes to pipeline and API that Microsoft Research, a staff mem- have occurred. It will also cover some of the tech- ber at the Scientific Computing and niques that leverage these features and ship in the Di- Imaging group at the University of rectX SDK: GPU Accelerated sparse morph targets, Utah and worked at both Evans and particle systems and procedural geometry. Sutherland and Parametric Tech- nologies. He is interested in most aspects of com- puter graphics and most of his publications are avail- able online. Modern computer and video games rendering techniques and how they can be used besides games in other fields of computer graphics such as cinematic rendering Folker Schamel – Spinor Abstract Speaker’s Bio The talk addresses current rendering techniques used in Folker Schamel heads the games, and future trends in development of the Shark this area. Furthermore, dif- 3D middleware platform ferent techniques used for for consoles and com- facing the increasing complexity of game technol- puter games, broadcast- ogy are discussed, for example different approaches ing, simulation and other of efficient graphical tool pipelines, feature assem- high quality interactive bling techniques, modularization, and software archi- realtime 3d applications. tectures. A second aspect of the talk is the usage of A mathematical physicist by training, Folker has a such techniques in other areas of computer graphics, decade of experience in realtime 3d development for such as broadcasting and digital film. The experi- the computer and console games industry. ences at Spinor on the value, advantages and disad- As Spinor’s representative of the OpenGL specifica- vantages of the different techniques in such areas are tion consortium ARB, Folker takes actively part in presented. the work on the specification of OpenGL. 4 Graphics meets Games Session 4: Academia meets Industry Discrepancy between research world and what actually works in games Matthias Müller-Fischer – Ageia Abstract physics is still an open research field. While the vi- sual quality might not be as compelling, interactiv- Physically based simulation has ity brings a completely new dimension to simulation. been an active research field in We would like to encourage researchers to advance computer graphics for the last into this new and exciting direction. twenty years. In early years, real time simulation was not possible Speaker’s Bio due to the lack of computing power. Still today, most methods presented at conferences target offline use. Matthias Müller-Fischer received The main reason being the possibility of producing his Ph.D. on atomistic simu- more realistic and visually compelling results – typi- lation of dense polymer sys- cally used for special effects in movies – even though tems in 1999 from ETH Zurich interactive applications, especially computer games and changed fields to macro- represent a far greater market than the movie indus- scopic physically-based simula- try. tions during his post-doc 1999- Making physical simulation methods suitable for the 2001 with the MIT Computer use in movies is challenging. However, it is even Graphics Group. more challenging to make these methods work in In 2002 he co-founded NovodeX, games. A game typically runs at 40-60 fps and phys- now a subsidiary of AGEIA Inc., ical simulations only get a fraction of the 20 mil- the company developing the world’s first Physics liseconds per time step. In addition, the simulation Processing Unit (PPU) for games. He currently must be stable even in unphysical environments and works for AGEIA as a principal software engineer it must consume as little memory as possible. responsible for the development of hardware acceler- There is already a substantial body of work con- ated simulation software for real-time effects such as cerning offline simulations. In contrast, interactive fluids, cloth and rigid body animation. Academia meets Industry – Panel Session Issues in collaboration of game developers, researchers, and educators Participate in a panel session with game developers, of Vienna, Austria.