Rendering of Rise of the Tomb Raider | Hacker News Reader

Rendering of Rise of the Tomb Raider

elopezr.com

227 pointsdoppp22 comments

This reminded me of another guy who does graphics study on how frames are rendered in GTA V, DOOM, etc:

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic...

Other games/discussions can be found at: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=adriancourreges.com

Cannot emphasise enough how interesting these breakdowns on Adrian Courrege's site are for me as a non-games dev. I wanted to post a comment in case an upvote isn't enough of an endorsement: if anyone's scrolling past and wondering what to read over their lunchtime, then click the links in parent post's comment - you won't be disappointed!

I'm incredibly excited for his hopefully-inevitable RDR2 investigation.

If I read his stuff correctly, this may not be possible before a PC release of the RDR2. Fingers crossed! :)

While not as in-depth, this is a fun analysis of Windwaker's graphics techniques done via observation and and emulator. https://polycount.com/discussion/104415/zelda-wind-waker-tec... If a PC port of RDR2 never happens, an analysis may still be possible. We may just have to wait a long time.

I love these (and the OP article). They've actually helped me implement things in my own little toy renderer, as they helped me understand how real renderers handle their many buffers and how they combine them for the final results. For example, they helped me understand a bit better how the dept-prepass works and how modern engines use deferred rendering. I'm very much looking forward to reading the article in detail later :)

"I can safely say without spoilers that in this frame bad guys chase Lara because she’s looking for an artifact they’re looking for too, a conflict of interest that absolutely must be resolved using weapons."

These "how they render these graphics" breakdowns are always like meditation to me. Even tho I don't work in graphics programming there's this vibe in these posts that always puts me in a chill mood. Instead of skimming I'm actually reading and digesting every sentence.

Does anyone feel the same about these kinds of posts? Were you able to pinpoint what specific writing features they employ that might elicit such responses in us?

Personally, I like the pretty pictures and as a (regular) software engineer, game engines are so far from my expertise that it's like reading about black magic. I'm completely in awe at the complexity, and multiple passes behind a simple game frame, which are rendered in under 16ms.

Video games are the best showcase of the ludicrous speed and potential of modern computing, while we're complaining because our text editors are sluggish to render a few glyphs :-)

What's interesting about these kinds of articles is that while very sophisticated and complex the process is often easy to understand.

There are a lot of cool tricks used that are also used in VFX compositing and also in image processing in more academic environments.

Yes, its a lot of small tricks and techniques that are combined and its easily understood what each step does (even if its hard to implement).

And all running at 30–60 frames per second.

I’d be very curious to see how Red Dead 2 or the new Resident Evil 2 remake renders a frame. There are a lot of volumetric effects and heavy post processing going on in both.

>An interesting thing I found is a level of detail (LOD) technique called ‘fizzle’ or ‘checkerboard’. It’s a common way to fade objects in and out at a distance, either to later replace it with a lower quality mesh or to completely make it disappear.

As a frequent video game player, I find this LOD switch technique to be atrocious. It's ugly as all hell and will ruin any immersion. Things don't checkerboard like that in reality, and it makes modern games look uglier. One of it's biggest problems is that it is often used to cull things too close to the camera, so instead of something softly fading out as the camera passes through it, it turns into Swiss cheese right in your face.

I always wondered, how do they get these intermediate renderings from the game? Is this some kind of profiling tool? And no source code required?

Interesting post, I enjoyed reading it. I'm not exactly wowed by the screenshots they chose to use though, especially the one specifically selected to demonstrate reflections.

Thought the same but always amazed by the volume of work in rendering graphics in games. Seeing screens in browser is always going to look different as well as compared to playing with a moving and dynamic view compared to a stationary one.

Yeah, I guess the author assumes you already know that the last Tomb Raider games are among the most visually stunning games on the market. The screenshots don't do a very good job convincing a layman of that fact.

I'm really glad you enjoyed the article. It's a hard process to select screenshots that properly showcase as many features of the game as possible, while also being visually pleasing and interesting. Often I want to take as few screenshots as possible and showcase as much as possible from that.

I agree that screenshot wasn't the best possible example, however since it included both fog and reflections I decided to go with it in the end. The reflections part was one of the last things I wrote.

Should be "(2018)" even though it's December 31st :).

Maybe it was 2019 in some parts of the world. :P

I don't see the value of tagging the year onto articles, unless the article is old and the content is time sensitive or not relevant anymore (ie, the year tag helps to warn you that the information is out of date and interesting mainly in a historical context). While you could argue that this information is time sensitive, its still super recent.

I personally do not like when articles are tagged with the year when the above is not true, because it gives the impression that the article is outdated, which makes some people pass over them sometimes, making me miss content I would have otherwise read and also reducing the amount of interesting discussion if people aren't reading the article. Why do I often pass over old articles? Because my time is limited, so I pick and choose what I will read and unless I'm interested in the history of a thing (I often, but not always, am), I'll skip articles that seem historical or out of date for ones that are current.

I'm not a fan of always tagging articles that weren't written in the current year, if the information is just as relevant now as when it was posted.

The year also helps with "I've probably already read that one" over "ohh, a new article about $thing!"

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