Playing With Reality: Environment, Situation, and GamesJeff Watson
Talk delivered at Different Games 2014. Explores how games “play with reality,” opening various avenues for inquiry around notions of environment and situation. Makes reference to Sartre, Goffman, and Baron Von Haussmann, among others, and offers up the following definition for game: “Games are semi-regulated situations that unfold over time and resolve based on the creative participation of one or more players.”
Pervasive and Environmental Game Design WorkshopJeff Watson
This workshop is intended for those who wish to explore how games can be designed to directly impact the social fabrics of lived environments such as schools, public institutions, workplaces, and neighborhoods. In specific, this workshop is about how artists, entertainers, educators, policy-makers, and activists can use game design to embolden and empower communities to actively engage in the creative construction of their own realities.
Game Design for Product Ideas and UI Design: we consider game design as a tool for design. Not as as an "add on" (= gamification), but a deep analysis tool.
A presentation I gave at KGC 2014 in November 2014. I introduce Umbra 3 and go through three customer use cases that show the sort of development we've done with some of our partners.
I cover Witcher 3 (CD Projekt RED), Quantum Break (Remedy Entertainment) and Destiny (Bungie).
Playing With Reality: Environment, Situation, and GamesJeff Watson
Talk delivered at Different Games 2014. Explores how games “play with reality,” opening various avenues for inquiry around notions of environment and situation. Makes reference to Sartre, Goffman, and Baron Von Haussmann, among others, and offers up the following definition for game: “Games are semi-regulated situations that unfold over time and resolve based on the creative participation of one or more players.”
Pervasive and Environmental Game Design WorkshopJeff Watson
This workshop is intended for those who wish to explore how games can be designed to directly impact the social fabrics of lived environments such as schools, public institutions, workplaces, and neighborhoods. In specific, this workshop is about how artists, entertainers, educators, policy-makers, and activists can use game design to embolden and empower communities to actively engage in the creative construction of their own realities.
Game Design for Product Ideas and UI Design: we consider game design as a tool for design. Not as as an "add on" (= gamification), but a deep analysis tool.
A presentation I gave at KGC 2014 in November 2014. I introduce Umbra 3 and go through three customer use cases that show the sort of development we've done with some of our partners.
I cover Witcher 3 (CD Projekt RED), Quantum Break (Remedy Entertainment) and Destiny (Bungie).
2024 State of Marketing Report – by HubspotMarius Sescu
https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing
· Scaling relationships and proving ROI
· Social media is the place for search, sales, and service
· Authentic influencer partnerships fuel brand growth
· The strongest connections happen via call, click, chat, and camera.
· Time saved with AI leads to more creative work
· Seeking: A single source of truth
· TLDR; Get on social, try AI, and align your systems.
· More human marketing, powered by robots
ChatGPT is a revolutionary addition to the world since its introduction in 2022. A big shift in the sector of information gathering and processing happened because of this chatbot. What is the story of ChatGPT? How is the bot responding to prompts and generating contents? Swipe through these slides prepared by Expeed Software, a web development company regarding the development and technical intricacies of ChatGPT!
Product Design Trends in 2024 | Teenage EngineeringsPixeldarts
The realm of product design is a constantly changing environment where technology and style intersect. Every year introduces fresh challenges and exciting trends that mold the future of this captivating art form. In this piece, we delve into the significant trends set to influence the look and functionality of product design in the year 2024.
How Race, Age and Gender Shape Attitudes Towards Mental HealthThinkNow
Mental health has been in the news quite a bit lately. Dozens of U.S. states are currently suing Meta for contributing to the youth mental health crisis by inserting addictive features into their products, while the U.S. Surgeon General is touring the nation to bring awareness to the growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The country has endured periods of low national morale, such as in the 1970s when high inflation and the energy crisis worsened public sentiment following the Vietnam War. The current mood, however, feels different. Gallup recently reported that national mental health is at an all-time low, with few bright spots to lift spirits.
To better understand how Americans are feeling and their attitudes towards mental health in general, ThinkNow conducted a nationally representative quantitative survey of 1,500 respondents and found some interesting differences among ethnic, age and gender groups.
Technology
For example, 52% agree that technology and social media have a negative impact on mental health, but when broken out by race, 61% of Whites felt technology had a negative effect, and only 48% of Hispanics thought it did.
While technology has helped us keep in touch with friends and family in faraway places, it appears to have degraded our ability to connect in person. Staying connected online is a double-edged sword since the same news feed that brings us pictures of the grandkids and fluffy kittens also feeds us news about the wars in Israel and Ukraine, the dysfunction in Washington, the latest mass shooting and the climate crisis.
Hispanics may have a built-in defense against the isolation technology breeds, owing to their large, multigenerational households, strong social support systems, and tendency to use social media to stay connected with relatives abroad.
Age and Gender
When asked how individuals rate their mental health, men rate it higher than women by 11 percentage points, and Baby Boomers rank it highest at 83%, saying it’s good or excellent vs. 57% of Gen Z saying the same.
Gen Z spends the most amount of time on social media, so the notion that social media negatively affects mental health appears to be correlated. Unfortunately, Gen Z is also the generation that’s least comfortable discussing mental health concerns with healthcare professionals. Only 40% of them state they’re comfortable discussing their issues with a professional compared to 60% of Millennials and 65% of Boomers.
Race Affects Attitudes
As seen in previous research conducted by ThinkNow, Asian Americans lag other groups when it comes to awareness of mental health issues. Twenty-four percent of Asian Americans believe that having a mental health issue is a sign of weakness compared to the 16% average for all groups. Asians are also considerably less likely to be aware of mental health services in their communities (42% vs. 55%) and most likely to seek out information on social media (51% vs. 35%).
AI Trends in Creative Operations 2024 by Artwork Flow.pdfmarketingartwork
This article is all about what AI trends will emerge in the field of creative operations in 2024. All the marketers and brand builders should be aware of these trends for their further use and save themselves some time!
A report by thenetworkone and Kurio.
The contributing experts and agencies are (in an alphabetical order): Sylwia Rytel, Social Media Supervisor, 180heartbeats + JUNG v MATT (PL), Sharlene Jenner, Vice President - Director of Engagement Strategy, Abelson Taylor (USA), Alex Casanovas, Digital Director, Atrevia (ES), Dora Beilin, Senior Social Strategist, Barrett Hoffher (USA), Min Seo, Campaign Director, Brand New Agency (KR), Deshé M. Gully, Associate Strategist, Day One Agency (USA), Francesca Trevisan, Strategist, Different (IT), Trevor Crossman, CX and Digital Transformation Director; Olivia Hussey, Strategic Planner; Simi Srinarula, Social Media Manager, The Hallway (AUS), James Hebbert, Managing Director, Hylink (CN / UK), Mundy Álvarez, Planning Director; Pedro Rojas, Social Media Manager; Pancho González, CCO, Inbrax (CH), Oana Oprea, Head of Digital Planning, Jam Session Agency (RO), Amy Bottrill, Social Account Director, Launch (UK), Gaby Arriaga, Founder, Leonardo1452 (MX), Shantesh S Row, Creative Director, Liwa (UAE), Rajesh Mehta, Chief Strategy Officer; Dhruv Gaur, Digital Planning Lead; Leonie Mergulhao, Account Supervisor - Social Media & PR, Medulla (IN), Aurelija Plioplytė, Head of Digital & Social, Not Perfect (LI), Daiana Khaidargaliyeva, Account Manager, Osaka Labs (UK / USA), Stefanie Söhnchen, Vice President Digital, PIABO Communications (DE), Elisabeth Winiartati, Managing Consultant, Head of Global Integrated Communications; Lydia Aprina, Account Manager, Integrated Marketing and Communications; Nita Prabowo, Account Manager, Integrated Marketing and Communications; Okhi, Web Developer, PNTR Group (ID), Kei Obusan, Insights Director; Daffi Ranandi, Insights Manager, Radarr (SG), Gautam Reghunath, Co-founder & CEO, Talented (IN), Donagh Humphreys, Head of Social and Digital Innovation, THINKHOUSE (IRE), Sarah Yim, Strategy Director, Zulu Alpha Kilo (CA).
Trends In Paid Search: Navigating The Digital Landscape In 2024Search Engine Journal
The search marketing landscape is evolving rapidly with new technologies, and professionals, like you, rely on innovative paid search strategies to meet changing demands.
It’s important that you’re ready to implement new strategies in 2024.
Check this out and learn the top trends in paid search advertising that are expected to gain traction, so you can drive higher ROI more efficiently in 2024.
You’ll learn:
- The latest trends in AI and automation, and what this means for an evolving paid search ecosystem.
- New developments in privacy and data regulation.
- Emerging ad formats that are expected to make an impact next year.
Watch Sreekant Lanka from iQuanti and Irina Klein from OneMain Financial as they dive into the future of paid search and explore the trends, strategies, and technologies that will shape the search marketing landscape.
If you’re looking to assess your paid search strategy and design an industry-aligned plan for 2024, then this webinar is for you.
5 Public speaking tips from TED - Visualized summarySpeakerHub
From their humble beginnings in 1984, TED has grown into the world’s most powerful amplifier for speakers and thought-leaders to share their ideas. They have over 2,400 filmed talks (not including the 30,000+ TEDx videos) freely available online, and have hosted over 17,500 events around the world.
With over one billion views in a year, it’s no wonder that so many speakers are looking to TED for ideas on how to share their message more effectively.
The article “5 Public-Speaking Tips TED Gives Its Speakers”, by Carmine Gallo for Forbes, gives speakers five practical ways to connect with their audience, and effectively share their ideas on stage.
Whether you are gearing up to get on a TED stage yourself, or just want to master the skills that so many of their speakers possess, these tips and quotes from Chris Anderson, the TED Talks Curator, will encourage you to make the most impactful impression on your audience.
See the full article and more summaries like this on SpeakerHub here: https://speakerhub.com/blog/5-presentation-tips-ted-gives-its-speakers
See the original article on Forbes here:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2016/05/06/5-public-speaking-tips-ted-gives-its-speakers/&refURL=&referrer=#5c07a8221d9b
ChatGPT and the Future of Work - Clark Boyd Clark Boyd
Everyone is in agreement that ChatGPT (and other generative AI tools) will shape the future of work. Yet there is little consensus on exactly how, when, and to what extent this technology will change our world.
Businesses that extract maximum value from ChatGPT will use it as a collaborative tool for everything from brainstorming to technical maintenance.
For individuals, now is the time to pinpoint the skills the future professional will need to thrive in the AI age.
Check out this presentation to understand what ChatGPT is, how it will shape the future of work, and how you can prepare to take advantage.
A brief introduction to DataScience with explaining of the concepts, algorithms, machine learning, supervised and unsupervised learning, clustering, statistics, data preprocessing, real-world applications etc.
It's part of a Data Science Corner Campaign where I will be discussing the fundamentals of DataScience, AIML, Statistics etc.
Time Management & Productivity - Best PracticesVit Horky
Here's my presentation on by proven best practices how to manage your work time effectively and how to improve your productivity. It includes practical tips and how to use tools such as Slack, Google Apps, Hubspot, Google Calendar, Gmail and others.
The six step guide to practical project managementMindGenius
The six step guide to practical project management
If you think managing projects is too difficult, think again.
We’ve stripped back project management processes to the
basics – to make it quicker and easier, without sacrificing
the vital ingredients for success.
“If you’re looking for some real-world guidance, then The Six Step Guide to Practical Project Management will help.”
Dr Andrew Makar, Tactical Project Management
2024 State of Marketing Report – by HubspotMarius Sescu
https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing
· Scaling relationships and proving ROI
· Social media is the place for search, sales, and service
· Authentic influencer partnerships fuel brand growth
· The strongest connections happen via call, click, chat, and camera.
· Time saved with AI leads to more creative work
· Seeking: A single source of truth
· TLDR; Get on social, try AI, and align your systems.
· More human marketing, powered by robots
ChatGPT is a revolutionary addition to the world since its introduction in 2022. A big shift in the sector of information gathering and processing happened because of this chatbot. What is the story of ChatGPT? How is the bot responding to prompts and generating contents? Swipe through these slides prepared by Expeed Software, a web development company regarding the development and technical intricacies of ChatGPT!
Product Design Trends in 2024 | Teenage EngineeringsPixeldarts
The realm of product design is a constantly changing environment where technology and style intersect. Every year introduces fresh challenges and exciting trends that mold the future of this captivating art form. In this piece, we delve into the significant trends set to influence the look and functionality of product design in the year 2024.
How Race, Age and Gender Shape Attitudes Towards Mental HealthThinkNow
Mental health has been in the news quite a bit lately. Dozens of U.S. states are currently suing Meta for contributing to the youth mental health crisis by inserting addictive features into their products, while the U.S. Surgeon General is touring the nation to bring awareness to the growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The country has endured periods of low national morale, such as in the 1970s when high inflation and the energy crisis worsened public sentiment following the Vietnam War. The current mood, however, feels different. Gallup recently reported that national mental health is at an all-time low, with few bright spots to lift spirits.
To better understand how Americans are feeling and their attitudes towards mental health in general, ThinkNow conducted a nationally representative quantitative survey of 1,500 respondents and found some interesting differences among ethnic, age and gender groups.
Technology
For example, 52% agree that technology and social media have a negative impact on mental health, but when broken out by race, 61% of Whites felt technology had a negative effect, and only 48% of Hispanics thought it did.
While technology has helped us keep in touch with friends and family in faraway places, it appears to have degraded our ability to connect in person. Staying connected online is a double-edged sword since the same news feed that brings us pictures of the grandkids and fluffy kittens also feeds us news about the wars in Israel and Ukraine, the dysfunction in Washington, the latest mass shooting and the climate crisis.
Hispanics may have a built-in defense against the isolation technology breeds, owing to their large, multigenerational households, strong social support systems, and tendency to use social media to stay connected with relatives abroad.
Age and Gender
When asked how individuals rate their mental health, men rate it higher than women by 11 percentage points, and Baby Boomers rank it highest at 83%, saying it’s good or excellent vs. 57% of Gen Z saying the same.
Gen Z spends the most amount of time on social media, so the notion that social media negatively affects mental health appears to be correlated. Unfortunately, Gen Z is also the generation that’s least comfortable discussing mental health concerns with healthcare professionals. Only 40% of them state they’re comfortable discussing their issues with a professional compared to 60% of Millennials and 65% of Boomers.
Race Affects Attitudes
As seen in previous research conducted by ThinkNow, Asian Americans lag other groups when it comes to awareness of mental health issues. Twenty-four percent of Asian Americans believe that having a mental health issue is a sign of weakness compared to the 16% average for all groups. Asians are also considerably less likely to be aware of mental health services in their communities (42% vs. 55%) and most likely to seek out information on social media (51% vs. 35%).
AI Trends in Creative Operations 2024 by Artwork Flow.pdfmarketingartwork
This article is all about what AI trends will emerge in the field of creative operations in 2024. All the marketers and brand builders should be aware of these trends for their further use and save themselves some time!
A report by thenetworkone and Kurio.
The contributing experts and agencies are (in an alphabetical order): Sylwia Rytel, Social Media Supervisor, 180heartbeats + JUNG v MATT (PL), Sharlene Jenner, Vice President - Director of Engagement Strategy, Abelson Taylor (USA), Alex Casanovas, Digital Director, Atrevia (ES), Dora Beilin, Senior Social Strategist, Barrett Hoffher (USA), Min Seo, Campaign Director, Brand New Agency (KR), Deshé M. Gully, Associate Strategist, Day One Agency (USA), Francesca Trevisan, Strategist, Different (IT), Trevor Crossman, CX and Digital Transformation Director; Olivia Hussey, Strategic Planner; Simi Srinarula, Social Media Manager, The Hallway (AUS), James Hebbert, Managing Director, Hylink (CN / UK), Mundy Álvarez, Planning Director; Pedro Rojas, Social Media Manager; Pancho González, CCO, Inbrax (CH), Oana Oprea, Head of Digital Planning, Jam Session Agency (RO), Amy Bottrill, Social Account Director, Launch (UK), Gaby Arriaga, Founder, Leonardo1452 (MX), Shantesh S Row, Creative Director, Liwa (UAE), Rajesh Mehta, Chief Strategy Officer; Dhruv Gaur, Digital Planning Lead; Leonie Mergulhao, Account Supervisor - Social Media & PR, Medulla (IN), Aurelija Plioplytė, Head of Digital & Social, Not Perfect (LI), Daiana Khaidargaliyeva, Account Manager, Osaka Labs (UK / USA), Stefanie Söhnchen, Vice President Digital, PIABO Communications (DE), Elisabeth Winiartati, Managing Consultant, Head of Global Integrated Communications; Lydia Aprina, Account Manager, Integrated Marketing and Communications; Nita Prabowo, Account Manager, Integrated Marketing and Communications; Okhi, Web Developer, PNTR Group (ID), Kei Obusan, Insights Director; Daffi Ranandi, Insights Manager, Radarr (SG), Gautam Reghunath, Co-founder & CEO, Talented (IN), Donagh Humphreys, Head of Social and Digital Innovation, THINKHOUSE (IRE), Sarah Yim, Strategy Director, Zulu Alpha Kilo (CA).
Trends In Paid Search: Navigating The Digital Landscape In 2024Search Engine Journal
The search marketing landscape is evolving rapidly with new technologies, and professionals, like you, rely on innovative paid search strategies to meet changing demands.
It’s important that you’re ready to implement new strategies in 2024.
Check this out and learn the top trends in paid search advertising that are expected to gain traction, so you can drive higher ROI more efficiently in 2024.
You’ll learn:
- The latest trends in AI and automation, and what this means for an evolving paid search ecosystem.
- New developments in privacy and data regulation.
- Emerging ad formats that are expected to make an impact next year.
Watch Sreekant Lanka from iQuanti and Irina Klein from OneMain Financial as they dive into the future of paid search and explore the trends, strategies, and technologies that will shape the search marketing landscape.
If you’re looking to assess your paid search strategy and design an industry-aligned plan for 2024, then this webinar is for you.
5 Public speaking tips from TED - Visualized summarySpeakerHub
From their humble beginnings in 1984, TED has grown into the world’s most powerful amplifier for speakers and thought-leaders to share their ideas. They have over 2,400 filmed talks (not including the 30,000+ TEDx videos) freely available online, and have hosted over 17,500 events around the world.
With over one billion views in a year, it’s no wonder that so many speakers are looking to TED for ideas on how to share their message more effectively.
The article “5 Public-Speaking Tips TED Gives Its Speakers”, by Carmine Gallo for Forbes, gives speakers five practical ways to connect with their audience, and effectively share their ideas on stage.
Whether you are gearing up to get on a TED stage yourself, or just want to master the skills that so many of their speakers possess, these tips and quotes from Chris Anderson, the TED Talks Curator, will encourage you to make the most impactful impression on your audience.
See the full article and more summaries like this on SpeakerHub here: https://speakerhub.com/blog/5-presentation-tips-ted-gives-its-speakers
See the original article on Forbes here:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2016/05/06/5-public-speaking-tips-ted-gives-its-speakers/&refURL=&referrer=#5c07a8221d9b
ChatGPT and the Future of Work - Clark Boyd Clark Boyd
Everyone is in agreement that ChatGPT (and other generative AI tools) will shape the future of work. Yet there is little consensus on exactly how, when, and to what extent this technology will change our world.
Businesses that extract maximum value from ChatGPT will use it as a collaborative tool for everything from brainstorming to technical maintenance.
For individuals, now is the time to pinpoint the skills the future professional will need to thrive in the AI age.
Check out this presentation to understand what ChatGPT is, how it will shape the future of work, and how you can prepare to take advantage.
A brief introduction to DataScience with explaining of the concepts, algorithms, machine learning, supervised and unsupervised learning, clustering, statistics, data preprocessing, real-world applications etc.
It's part of a Data Science Corner Campaign where I will be discussing the fundamentals of DataScience, AIML, Statistics etc.
Time Management & Productivity - Best PracticesVit Horky
Here's my presentation on by proven best practices how to manage your work time effectively and how to improve your productivity. It includes practical tips and how to use tools such as Slack, Google Apps, Hubspot, Google Calendar, Gmail and others.
The six step guide to practical project managementMindGenius
The six step guide to practical project management
If you think managing projects is too difficult, think again.
We’ve stripped back project management processes to the
basics – to make it quicker and easier, without sacrificing
the vital ingredients for success.
“If you’re looking for some real-world guidance, then The Six Step Guide to Practical Project Management will help.”
Dr Andrew Makar, Tactical Project Management
2. 2
UMBRA
SOFTWARE
OCCLUSION CULLING MIDDLEWARE
FOR TRIPLE-A GAMES
RELATIONSHIP WITH UNITY
STARTED IN 2010
FOUNDED IN 2007
14 EMPLOYEES
BASED IN HELSINKI, FINLAND
SUPPORT OFFICE IN SEATTLE, WA
SAME PROBLEM – DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS
“Level artists are there to fill the
world with content. Integrating Umbra saved
us not only artist time but the time to create
and maintain an efficient visibility culling
solution. Umbra’s support provides us with the
solutions and features that we need.”
“Umbra’s technology is playing an important role
in the creation of our next universe, by freeing our artists
from the burden of manual markups typically associated
with polygon soup.”
13. VISIBILITY DATA GENERATION
1. CONVERT INPUT POLYGON SOUP INTO VOXELS
2. GROUP EMPTY SPACE VOXELS INTO CELLS
3. COLLECT OBJECTS IN CELLS
4. GENERATE PORTALS BETWEEN CELLS
TOME OF VISIBILITY
14. RUNTIME
BASIC OPERATION AS IN A TRADITIONAL PORTALS AND CELLS
SYSTEM
1.FIND CELL THAT CAMERA IS IN
2.TRAVERSE PORTALS-AND-CELLS GRAPH
3.GATHER VISIBLE OBJECTS IN CELLS
GENERATES AN OCCLUSION BUFFER FOR DYNAMIC OBJECT TESTING
20. BACKFACE THRESHOLD
SMALLER OCCLUSION DATA
LESS VISIBLE BACKFACES IN SCENE
MORE UNDEFINED AREAS
LARGER OCCLUSION DATA
MORE VISIBLE BACKFACES IN SCENE
LESS UNDEFINED AREAS
Hello everybody.
My name is Sampo Lappalainen and I work for Umbra Software.
Thank you all for coming to this last presentation of the day. Our presentations are typically very tech heavy as is our software, but I try to keep things as practical and hands on as possible.
So I’m here to talk about how you can use occlusion culling to improve the frame-rates of your unity games. I’m going to explain the basics of how the system works and then give a few very specific tips on how to tweak it for the best performance.
There’s not enough time to cover every aspect of the system in a complete detail so I’m going to leave time for questions after the presentation so we can address the most interesting aspects for you all.
A little bit of background.
(soap story)
Umbra software is an independent team of computer graphics geeks based in Helsinki, Finland
Our customer base mostly consists of triple-A games studios, but obviously as I’m up here, we have some entanglements with mobile and smaller-scale productions as well. We’ve been happily married with Unity since 2010, so that’s 5 years already! As a matter of fact, we’ve been partners with Unity pretty much throughout the entire devcycle of Umbra 3, the tech I’m here to talk to you about.
We have kept going at it since 2007 – and individually even before that.
Before I dive in into further into the technology let me just quickly give you some context by showing some of the video games the Umbra technology is used to power-up.
This is little title was released today and we’re proud to be part of it on PC, xbox one and ps4.
...this powerful technology is available to you. In Unity 4.3 (Pro).
To make your games run better.
Doing this allows you to add more detail to the visible part of the world in the same frame budget!
In short, better looking games that run faster.
Not all 3D games or environments will significantly benefit from occlusion culling. Games with top-down views, mostly transparent elements or stationary cameras etc.
Doing this allows you to add more detail to the visible part of the world in the same frame budget!
In short, better looking games that run faster.
Not all 3D games or environments will significantly benefit from occlusion culling. Games with top-down views, mostly transparent elements or stationary cameras etc.
This is a high level overview on how the visibility data generation works.
The first step is to create a voxel grid out of the incoming polygon soup.
Voxels because:
No issues with floating point accuracy or small modeling issues
-Can choose the granularity at this we operate that is independent on the complexity of the input
Visibility cells are built by grouping empty-space voxels. For each such group of empty voxels, we collect the objects that they touch and generate 2D rectangle portals for where they touch neighboring cells.
The magic happens in the next step (5), where we analyze what we have and iteratively remove portals from the data that do not contribute to occlusion in a significant way. Removing portals causes cells to be collapsed together.
We could keep removing portals to hit a given budget, but even better we can remove portals up to a certain threshold of how much conservativity we are willing to accept in the result.
The final piece of the puzzle is that we need to be able to tell in which cell a given query point is. For this, we simply take the voxelization and build a KD-tree for the cells.
We call the output of this process a ”tome” – a tome of visibility..
The other part of the solution is the runtime query module.
The basic principle of operation is very much like what a traditional portal culling system does.
We find the cell that we are in from the cell KD-tree. This is O(log(n)) cheap.
Then we traverse the graph, limiting visibility to cells by processing portals as we go.
As we traverse, we collect objects from cells and test against currect visibility.
The big difference is that instead of recursively traversing and clipping the frustum, we rasterize the encountered portals into a per cell occluder mask. This allows us to proceed in a breadth-first fashion, not having to process each cell multiple times. Since we are rasterizing anti-occluders instead of occluders conservative rasterization in lower resolution becomes easy, we can always grow primitives without producing errors.
The whole query can be pretty trivially parallelized by subdividing in screen space and processing each sub-frustum separately.
In addition to returning a list of visible objects, we also build a global 16-bit depth buffer as the result of the traversal.
This can then be used for additional visibility tests for dynamic elements.
To make this is easy as possible to integrate, we’ve made this run in fixed memory of around a hundred kilobytes.
Also there is no state stored from one query to the next, every execution starts fresh. This is particularly important for being able to run multiple queries for multiple views in a flexible fashion.
We simplified the interface by hiding a lot of stuff from the interface. For instance, only Smallest hole, Smallest Occluder and Backface Threshold are visible.
The input is controlled using the smallest hole parameter. When voxelizing the occluder geometry, smallest hole maps almost directly to the voxel size. This means that if your geometry contains intentional holes, gaps or cracks that you wish to see through, using a smallest hole smaller than these is a good idea. On the other hand, a lot of the time the geometry contains lots of unintentional cracks that you do not wish to see through. A reasonable voxel resolution will patch these up. It may help to think about smallest hole as the “input resolution” of the bake.
Note that setting smallest hole into a ridiculously small value means that baking will be unacceptably slow and/or take up a monumental amount of memory in the editor. In some rare cases, it may even cause the bake to fail due to insufficient memory. Then again, while using a larger value will be faster and more memory-friendly, it may cause Umbra to not see through things like grates or fences. So bigger isn’t always better either. In general, a smallest hole as large as possible without visible errors is desirable. In practice, we’ve found that values between 5 cm to 50 cm work fairly well for most games where the scale is “human-like”. The default value in Unity is 25 cm, and it’s a good starting point.
While smallest hole mostly deals with what type of input geometry you have, smallest occluder determines what kind of output data is produced. In essence, you can think about smallest occluder as the output resolution of the data. The larger the value, the faster it is to perform occlusion culling in the runtime, but at the cost of increased conservativity (false positives). The smaller the value, the more accurate results are generated, but at the cost of more CPU time. Obviously higher-resolution data will mean a larger occlusion data size as well.
In most games, keeping smallest occluder slightly larger than the player, so around a few meters, is a good default. So anywhere between 2 and 6 meters may make sense if your game’s scale isn’t microscopic or galactic. The default value in Unity is 5 meters.
Perhaps the most difficult parameter to grasp is called backface threshold. While in many cases you don’t really need to change it, there are some situations in which it may come in handy to understand how it affects the generated data.
First, it’s important to note that the parameter exists only for a single purpose: occlusion data size optimization. This means that if your occlusion data size is OK, you should probably just disregard backface threshold altogether. Second, the value is interpreted as a percentage, so a value of 90 means 90% and so on.
Umbra uses the occluder object triangle winding information to optimize for its data size. Any location within the scene where the ratio of visible triangle backfaces to visible front faces is larger than the assigned threshold is deemed to be invalid. So for instance, the parts under the terrain or inside solid occluders can be removed from the output data.
The purpose of the Visibility Lines visualization is to show you the line of sight that Umbra sees. The way it works is that Umbra will project its depth buffer back into the scene and draw lines to the furthermost non-occluded points in the camera’s view. This may help you to figure out, for instance, which holes or gaps cause “leaks” in occlusion, ultimately causing some objects to become visible. This may also reveal some dubious situations where some object that clearly should be a good occluder, doesn’t occlude anything because of, say, forgetting to enable the static occluder flag for the object.
Describes the Umbra algorithm in more detail
A great troubleshooting guide