Slides for the talk: [ Ссылка ]
Shading with many lights can help solving several problems facing the development of next-generation high-end games. To achieve the level of performance needed to make this possible, light management and shading have evolved dramatically in recent years. This talk presents an in-depth exploration of many-light management, starting with background and progressing to state-of-the-art research, including recent results on supporting shadows. The presentation centers around Clustered Shading, which is the most efficient and robust technique to date. Clustered shading was introduced in a 2012 paper, by Ola Olsson and co-authors, and has already been adopted in at least three AAA games. The last part of the talk describes extending the techniques to using virtual shadow maps for many lights, to achieve both high quality and performance.
Ola Olsson is a postdoc at UQ, researching bio-inspired vision processing, using GPUs. He received his PhD in real-time graphics in 2014 from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. His research focused on massively parallel GPU-algorithms for managing and shading thousands of lights in real time, resulting in several publications on Tiled and Clustered Shading, most recently describing how to add support for shadows. He has given several well-attended talks about his research at SIGGRAPH and other conferences. Before becoming a PhD student, Ola was a games programmer for around 10 years with roles ranging from game-play programmer on 'Ty the Tasmanian Tiger', to lead rendering programmer and technical director on 'Race Pro'.
