The Rendering Technology of 'Lords of the Fallen' (Game Connection Europe 2014)

The Rendering Technology
of 'Lords of the Fallen'
Philip Hammer (Deck13 Interactive)
@philiphammer0
phammer@deck13.com
GameConnection Europe 2014
October 29-31, Porte de Versailles, Paris

Agenda
● Introduction
● Current-Generation Deferred Rendering
● Deferred Transparent Lighting
● Transparent Shadowcasting
● Volumetric Lighting
● Q&A
The Rendering Technology of 'Lords of the Fallen', GameConnection Europe 2014

Intro: Who is Deck13?
● Deck13 Interactive is one of the leading game developers in Germany
○ ~50 people in Frankfurt office + 6 people in Hamburg office
○ In-house multiplatform technology FLEDGE
(PS4, Xbox One, PC, PS3, Xbox 360, iOS)
○ Previously: Venetica, Jack Keane, Blood Knights, Tiger & Chicken, etc.

Intro: Who am I?
● Senior Engine/Graphics Programmer
○ Working since >8 Years @ Deck13 Interactive
○ Part of an amazing team of 9 full-time programmers
● Responsible for the overall rendering system, lighting, materials, etc.

Intro: What is ‘Lords of the Fallen’?
● Deck13’s largest title so far
● 3rd-person challenging Action-RPG
● Dark, demonic fantasy setting
● Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC (DX11)
● Release this week
○ First PS4 release from a german developer
○ Some reviews are already out

Current Generation Deferred Rendering

● We’re not doing super-duper funky stuff..
○ .. just combining some well-known techniques in the right way
● We’re not covering the basics of deferred rendering..
○ .. but our specific differences to the textbook
● Game-production started as a PS3/X360 title
○ Switched early in development after new platforms got introduced
○ All last-gen assets replaced
○ We had to find “next gen” for ourselves and adapt the tech

● Major advancements in FLEDGE
○ Switched from DX9 to DX11 only
○ Switched from Light-Prepass to more traditional Deferred Rendering
○ Support for deferred transparent object lighting (incl. particles)
○ Support for Volumetric Lighting
○ Support of parallax-corrected cubemap reflections [Lagarde12]
○ Massively multithreaded rendering for consoles
○ Massive utilization of hardware-instanced geometry
○ Global Illumination (using Geomerics Enlighten)
○ Advanced physics simulations for Clothing, GPU-Particles, etc.
(using NVIDIA PhysX)
○ Support a lot more objects, lights, shadows, decals, etc.
○ etc.

● Switch from Light-Prepass to Deferred Rendering
○ Second geometry-pass was too costly
○ Way more bandwidth and memory available in this HW generation
(+ more flexible ESRAM on XB1)
○ Challenge: Move a lot of rendering effects to deferred stages
(e.g. Fog, Reflections, etc.)

G-Buffer Layout
● G-Buffer should be as small as possible
○ Parameter encoding
■ 2-channel normals
■ 2-channel albedo + specular-color
(chroma subsampling, YCoCg, inspired by [Mavridis12])
○ Parameter packing
■ Pack single bits and use lower precision for some attributes
○ Share channels for mutually exclusive parameters
■ Material-ID/-Index for referencing per-material parameters
○ 128 bpp (31,64 MB @ 1080p) even fits fully into XB1 ESRAM

G-Buffer Layout
RED GREEN BLUE ALPHA
MRT0
RGBA8_UNORM
Encoded Normal Material-
ID / Index
Specular
Exponent
MRT1
RGBA8_UNORM
Albedo
Luma
Albedo
Chroma
Spec.
Luma
Spec. Chroma /
Translucency
L-Buffer (Diffuse)
R11G11B10_F
Irradiance Lightmap -
Depth/Stencil
D24S8
Depth Stencil

G-Buffer Layout
MRT0
RGBA8_UNORM
ID / Index
Specular
Exponent
MRT1
RGBA8_UNORM
Albedo
Luma
Albedo
Chroma
Spec.
Luma
Spec. Chroma /
Translucency
L-Buffer (Diffuse)
R11G11B10_F
Depth/Stencil
D24S8
Depth Stencil
● Colored Specular and Translucency are mutually exclusive!
○ Determined by Material-ID

G-Buffer Layout
MRT0
RGBA8_UNORM
ID / Index
Specular
Exponent
MRT1
RGBA8_UNORM
Albedo
Luma
Albedo
Chroma
Spec.
Luma
Spec. Chroma /
Translucency
L-Buffer (Diffuse)
R11G11B10_F
Depth/Stencil
D24S8
Depth Stencil
● 1 Bit Material-ID determines whether MRT1.a contains
translucency or specular chroma.
● 7 Bit Material-Index used to reference
Material Parameter Buffers (more on this later)

G-Buffer Layout
MRT0
RGBA8_UNORM
ID / Index
Specular
Exponent
MRT1
RGBA8_UNORM
Albedo
Luma
Albedo
Chroma
Spec.
Luma
Spec. Chroma /
Translucency
L-Buffer (Diffuse)
R11G11B10_F
Depth/Stencil
D24S8
Depth Stencil
● Stencil used for masking
○ 3 Bits for Decals, Reflections, Skin/SSSSS
○ 2 Bits double-sided Light-Volume Stenciling

G-Buffer Layout
● We needed more attributes for special effects
○ Tangents for smooth alpha-test
○ Per-object rimlights, emissive/glow & other FX
○ Motion-Vectors of moving/dynamic objects for motionblur
○ Distortion-Vectors for Post-Distort
● Not enough space in G-Buffer, but only needed for ~10% of objects
○ Render them in a separate pass and blend (glow) or
use immediately in subsequent pass (motion-/distortion-vectors)

Material Parameter Buffer
● G-Buffer stores surface-parameters ..
○ .. but some surface-parameters are not needed per-pixel
○ Store certain surface parameters indirectly to avoid
wasting precious G-Buffer space
● Introduce a “Material Parameter Buffer”
○ Generate a LUT which contains material parameters once per frame
○ Store the LUT index in the G-Buffer to gain access to the parameters later

Material Parameter Buffer
● “Sparse” parameters would unnecessarily bloat G-Buffer
○ We don’t want to afford more G-Buffer space
○ We have quite a lot artist-tweakable parameters
● Material-based Parameter examples
○ Reflection-Strength
○ Fresnel
○ Subsurface-scattering parameters
○ etc.

Material Parameter Buffer (Example)
● Example: Implementation of
“Approximating Translucency for a Fast, Cheap and
Convincing Subsurface Scattering Look” [Brisebois12]
in a deferred scenario without compromising the parameters
● Problem:
A lot of properties varying per material, but effect is applied during in
deferred light-pass
● Solution:
Store scalar translucency values per-pixel in G-Buffer and all other
properties in Material Parameter Buffer

Material-Index sssDistortion sssPower sssMaterialColor …
0 4.5 2.4 0.43, 0.39, 0.84 …
1 8.0 3.5 0.22, 0.51, 0.52 …
2 5.6 4.1 0.41, 0.43, 0.11 …
... ... ... ... ...
Parameters per Light
Parameters per Material
Parameters per Pixel
// backscattering, according to [Brisebois12]
float3 sssLightVector = L + N * sssDistortion ;
float sssDot = exp2 ( saturate (
dot ( V, -sssLightVector ) ) *
sssPower - sssPower ) * sssScale ;
float3 sssColor = ( sssDot *
sssMaterialColor * sssLightColor ) * translucency ;

Material-Index sssDistortion sssPower sssMaterialColor …
0 4.5 2.4 0.43, 0.39, 0.84 …
1 8.0 3.5 0.22, 0.51, 0.52 …
2 5.6 4.1 0.41, 0.43, 0.11 …
... ... ... ... ...
Find implementation details in
Appendix 1 or ask me in Q&A.

Deferred Transparent Lighting

Deferred Transparent Lighting
● Most engines use Forward Rendering for transparents in Deferred
Rendering scenarios
○ Typical drawbacks: light-count, shadowing, etc.
● We wanted a deferred solution
● And we ended up with two different kinds of it
○ Deferred Per-Pixel
■ “expensive” - used for selected objects
○ Deferred Per-Vertex
■ “cheap” - used mostly for particles

Deferred Per-Pixel Transparent Lighting
● Gives you one additional layer of lighting
● Straight-forward implementation
(with similarities to Light-Prepass Rendering)
○ 1. Render a second G-Buffer
■ Only with lit transparent objects
■ Advise the artists to flag only a few transparent objects as lit
○ 2. Render a second L-Buffer
■ Render all light volumes also on the second layer
○ 3. Blend the transparent objects onto final scene while
sampling the light of the second L-Buffer

Deferred Per-Pixel Transparent Lighting
● Caveats
○ You *can* easily destroy your performance ,,
■ .. but it won’t if used wisely
○ Memory consumption is higher, but not a big deal on current-gen console ..
■ .. and you can reuse rendertargets in different rendering stages
● Optimizations
○ Mask rendered pixels in stencil for culling
○ Rough Scene-AABB culling
■ Build AABB of all lit transparent objects once per frame
■ Check against light-volume AABBs
■ Omit a lot of lights cheaply

Deferred Particle Lighting
● “We want lit particles!”
○ Particles fitting better to the scene
○ Particles can be re-used under different lighting conditions

● Common type of particles: atmospheric, smoke, dust & fog effects
○ Usually transparent, dense ... and cause a lot of overdraw
○ Costs can easily explode when lighting every fragment
○ Non-directional, low-frequency information
○ Perfect for vertex-lighting
● Deferred vertex-lighting
○ No compromise in number of affecting lights and shadows
○ Fits perfectly into deferred pipeline

● Again three steps to success
○ Step 1: Render Vertex G-Buffer
■ Write particle vertex positions sequentially into a texture
○ Step 2: Render Vertex L-Buffer
■ Accumulate light volumes
○ Step 3: Particle Rendering
■ Sample L-Buffer and apply lighting
● Find implementation details in Appendix 2 and ask in Q&A.

● Great for many types of particles
○ Cheap and effective
○ Apply all light types and features like shadows, gobos, IES, etc.
● Inherits problems of all per-vertex techniques
○ Low spatial resolution
○ Works best with small particles
○ Very small and bright lights can lead to flickering if
isolated corners of particles getting suddenly lit
● Be wary of buffer overflow with many lit particles

Transparent Shadows

Transparent Shadows
● All lights can cast colored, dynamic, transparent shadows
● Simple and effective approach

Transparent Shadows
● All lights can cast colored, dynamic, transparent shadows
● Simple and effective approach
○ Render solid shadows as usual into shadowmap
○ Render/Blend transparent objects into shadowmap-sized RGBA8 buffer
○ Use shadowmap as depth-buffer
○ Sample transparent shadowbuffer with shadow UVs and multiply with light

Transparent Shadows
● Works also with volumetric lights, transparent particles, etc.
● Individual features really shine when everything works together

Volumetric Lighting

Volumetric Lighting
● One of the major effect for “Next Gen”-Look
● Raymarching-based Approach
○ Inspired by “Real-time Volumetric Lighting in participating media” [Toth09]
○ Raymarching in light’s view space while evaluating the shadowmap
○ Interleaved Sampling and Temporal Reprojection for Performance

Volumetric Lighting
● Multiple light-types and -features
○ Point, Spot, Box
○ Also evaluate shadowmap, projector-texture(s), transparent shadows, IES light-profiles,
animated noise volume-texture, etc.

Volumetric Lighting
● Optimizations
○ Interleaved Sampling
○ Low-resolution rendering with depth-aware upsampling
○ Temporal Reprojection

Volumetric Lighting
● Performance
Pass PC / DX11 (GTX
700 GPU)
PS4 / GNM
Accumulation 0.362 ms 0.161 ms
Gather 0.223 ms 0.375 ms
Upscale 0.127 ms 0.321 ms
= 0.712 = 0.857 ms

Volumetric Lighting
● Attention: Artists love it and therefore tend to overuse it
● See for the gritty details:
“Volumetric Lighting for Many Lights in Lords of the Fallen” by Benjamin
Glatzel

Thanks for listening!
@philiphammer0
phammer@deck13.com

@philiphammer0
phammer@deck13.com
Questions?

.. and thanks to the Deck13 development team, making all this possible.
.. and very special thanks to the Tech-Team which contributed a lot to this talk (alphabetical)
● Arturo Cepeda
● Holger Durach
● Michele Giacalone (@miccalone)
● Benjamin Glatzel (@begla)
● Robert Hallinger (@robih29)
● Philip Hammer (@philiphammer0)
● Thorsten Lange
● Dominik Lazarek (@Omme)
● David Reinig (@D13_Dreinig)

References
[Glatzel14] “Volumetric Lighting for Many Lights in Lords of the Fallen”, Digital Dragons 2014,
http://de.slideshare.net/BenjaminGlatzel/volumetric-lighting-for-many-lights-in-lords-of-the-fallen
[Mavridis12] "The Compact YCoCg Frame Buffer", Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012
[Lagarde12] “Local Image-based Lighting With Parallax-corrected Cubemap”, Siggraph, 2012
[Brisebois12] “Approximating Translucency for a Fast, Cheap and Convincing Subsurface Scattering Look”, GDC 2011
http://dice.se/wp-content/uploads/Colin_BarreBrisebois_Programming_ApproximatingTranslucency.pdf
[Persson07] “Deep Deferred Shading”, Blog Post 2007
http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=75
[Drobot12] "Lighting of Killzone: Shadow Fall"
http://de.slideshare.net/guerrillagames/lighting-of-killzone-shadow-fall
[Toth09] “Real-time Volumetric Lighting in Participating Media”, Eurographics 2009
http://sirkan.iit.bme.hu/~szirmay/lightshaft.pdf

Appendix 1 - Material Parameter Buffer
● Step 1/3: Buffer generation
○ Generate a buffer / LUT (array of structs) each frame on the CPU
■ Determine for each drawcall a set of material parameters
■ Smart value quantization and interleaving
○ LUT contains selected data of the currently rendered materials
■ DX11/GNM: structured buffer
■ DX9: multiple 1D textures

● Step 2/3: G-Buffer stage
○ Write the LUT-index to the G-Buffer
■ Pass the index as shader constant
(index is associated with the material during (1) )
○ can index up to 128 different materials per frame
● 7 bit, because 1 bit reserved for Material-ID

● Step 3/3: Lighting/Combine stage(s)
○ Bind the Material Parameter Buffer(s) to the shader
○ Sample/unpack the Material-Index from G-Buffer
○ Grab and use the parameter values when needed like
value = buffer[index].x

Pixel-Shader
// fragment shader for indexing deferred material-parameter Buffer
Buffer <float4 > parameterBuffer ;
uint materialIndex = unpackMaterialIndex(gbuffer0Value . a);
float4 matParamBuffer0 = parameterBuffer[materialIndex];
float4 matParamBuffer1 = parameterBuffer[materialIndex + 1];
float sssDistortion = matParamBuffer0 . x ;
// backscattering according to [Brisebois12]
float3 sssLightVector = L + N * sssDistortion ;
float sssDot = exp2 ( saturate ( dot ( V, -sssLightVector ) ) * sssPower - sssPower ) * sssScale ;
float3 sssColor = ( sssDot * sssMaterialColor * sssLightColor ) * backscattering_mask ;

Appendix 2 - Deferred Particle Lighting
● Step 1/3: Particle Vertex G-Buffer
○ Render a non-screenspace particle “G-Buffer”
■ Basically a sequential list
○ Render particle vertex-buffer as point-list
(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_POINTLIST)
○ Rasterize viewspace-positions of particles subsequently into a buffer
■ Currently a 1024x512 RGBA16F texture for all visible lit particles
○ G-Buffer currently contains only vertex-positions
■ Could be extended with more surface attributes like
translucency or normals

● Step 1/3: Particle Vertex G-Buffer
// vertex-shader
// pos = SV_Position
float4 pos = 1.0 ;
// vertexId = SV_VertexID, instanceId = SV_InstanceID
// param_vertexcount = shader constant holding the currently rendered number of vertices
float vertexIndex = vertexId + ( instanceId * vertexCountPerInstance) + param_vertexcount ;
float rasterPosY = trunc ( vertexIndex / textureWidth ) ;
float rasterPosX = trunc ( vertexIndex - rasterPosY * textureWidth ) ;
pos . x = ( ( rasterPosX * 2.0 ) - textureWidth ) / textureWidth ;
pos . y = ( ( rasterPosY * 2.0 ) - textureHeight ) / textureHeight ;
pos . zw = 1.0 ;

● Step 2/3: Particle Vertex L-Buffer
○ Apply lighting similar to normal deferred lighting
○ Use fullscreen-quads instead of light-volumes, because the fragments
have no spatial relationship (non-screenspace fragment list)
■ Optimization: Stencil-Mask each fragment in Per-Vertex G-Buffer
○ Different light-types, shadows, projected textures, etc. “just works”
○ Very simple “lighting model”: just add up light colors
○ Shadowing: PCF with large kernel width reduces flickering
in shadow/light transitions

● Step 2/3: Particle Vertex L-Buffer
// pixel shader
// trivial implementation (different for each light type):
// - sample g-buffer containing the viewspace positions of particle vertices
// - compute light attenuation base on position and light parameters (...)
float3 positionVS = SAMPLE ( perVertexGBufferSampler, screenUV . xy ) . rgb ;
col0 . rgb = light_color . rgb * getLightAttenuation ( positionVS ) * getShadowing ( positionVS ) ;

● Step 3/3: Particle Rendering
○ Render particles as you would normally render them
○ Apply lighting
■ Compute UVs according to the rasterized position from Step 1
■ Sample the Particle L-Buffer in Vertex-Shader
■ Interpolate lighting to fragment shader and modulate with particle texture
○ Take care of exact rendering order
(must be the same as in Step 1/3)

● Step 3/3: Particle Rendering
// vertex-shader
// vertexId = SV_VertexID, instanceId = SV_InstanceID
// param_vertexcount = shader constant holding the currently rendered number of vertices
float vertexIndex = vertexId + ( instanceId * vertexCountPerInstance ) + param_vertexcount ;
float3 perVertexLightBufferUV = 0;
perVertexLightBufferUV . y = trunc ( vertexIndex / textureWidth ) ;
perVertexLightBufferUV . x = trunc ( vertexIndex - perVertexLightBufferUV . y * textureWidth ) ;
perVertexLightBufferUV . y = ( textureHeight - 1.0 ) - perVertexLightBufferUV . y ;
float4 lbufferValue = perVertexLightBufferTexture . Load ( (int3)perVertexLightBufferUV . xyz ) ;
// pixel-shader
col0 . rgb = particleTextureColor . rgb * f_in . lbufferValue . rgb ;

The Rendering Technology of 'Lords of the Fallen' (Game Connection Europe 2014)

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