H Brun | 03.06.12
We are excited to return in force to the Game Developers Conference. This year, we give a number of lectures from different aspects of developing our award-winning title Battlefield 3™.
If you’re attending the show, visit any of these lectures for an in-depth look at topics ranging from building a scalable terrain system to the animation process and philosophy behind Battlefield 3. Schedule and full details below. Hope to see you there!
Terrain in Battlefield 3: A Modern, Complete and Scalable System
SPEAKER/S: Mattias Widmark (EA DICE)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Wednesday 5:00- 6:00 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl
TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Programming / 60-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC VAULT RECORDING: Video Recorded
DESCRIPTION: In the session, we’ll take a complete look at the terrain system in Frostbite 2 as it was applied in Battlefield 3. The session is partitioned into three parts. We begin with the scalability aspects and discuss how consistent use of hierarchies allowed us to combine high resolutions with high view distances. We then turn towards workflow aspects and describe how we achieved full in-game real-time editing. A fair amount of time is spent describing how issues were addressed.
Finally, we look at the runtime side. We describe usage of CPU, GPU and memory resources and how it was kept to a minimum. We discuss how the GPU is offloaded by caching intermediate results in a procedural virtual texture and how prioritization was done to allow for work throttling without sacrificing quality. We also go into depth about the flexible streaming system that work with both FPS and driving games.
TAKEAWAY: Main takeaway is to see the full picture of a modern, scalable and flexible terrain engine that would work equally well for simulators as for games. A few novelties stand out, such as the procedural virtual textures and the flexible streaming system, both described in detail.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Target audience is software engineers working with rendering in general, tools (level editors), data pipelines, streaming or that are just curious. Some technical artists may be interested too. No field-specific knowledge is required, but some knowledge of basic data structures (quadtrees) and basic rendering (shader graphs, virtual textures) helps.
Modular Rigging in Battlefield 3
SPEAKER/S: Johan Ramstrom (EA DICE)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Wednesday 3:30- 3:55 Room 3009, West Hall, 3rd Fl
TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Visual Arts , Production / 25-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC VAULT RECORDING: Video Recorded
DESCRIPTION: For Battlefield 3, DICE took on its most difficult challenge so far. To raise the bar for character quality in games we developed our own deformation rig, combined it with the powerful ANT animation system (used in FIFA) and extensive motion capture usage. To create a believable experience we built and managed enormous amount of assets and ways of keeping these organized. The rigging process was one of the most challenging aspects of production, with the smallest change requiring an update for almost every single asset. With a modular rigging system and a flexible animation pipeline the production team could deliver on time and quality.
TAKEAWAY: This session will discuss the benefits of using a modular rigging system and what we’ve learned during the production of Battlefield 3.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Technical artists and technical animators working with character deformation, rigging, facial setup and production pipelines.
Animation methodology for Battlefield 3
SPEAKER/S: Tobias Dahl (DICE/EA) and
Mikael Hogstrom (DICE/EA)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Wednesday 5:00- 6:00 Room 3007, West Hall, 3rd Fl
TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Visual Arts , Game Design / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC VAULT RECORDING: Video Recorded
DESCRIPTION: Learn about the animation process behind creating Battlefield 3 but also the philosophy behind animation as a whole at DICE. The presentation will cover topics regarding both single and multiplayer animation challenges, as well as team oriented challenges. At DICE we are strong believers that animation span over more areas than just content creation and we will talk about how this affects our daily work at the studio. We will also share the problems we faced starting work on our biggest title yet and how we solved them.
TAKEAWAY: This talk you will give you a deep insight on how it is to work as an animator at DICE and why we chose this path. You will also learn about the animation challenges we faced creating Battlefield 3 and how we overcame them.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: This talk is for everyone that is interested in learning more about creating a large multiplayer\single player game from an animation perspective.
Stable SSAO in Battlefield 3 with Selective Temporal Filtering
SPEAKER/S: Louis Bavoil (NVIDIA)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Friday 12:05-12:30 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl
TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Programming / 25-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC VAULT RECORDING: Video Recorded
DESCRIPTION: With the highest-quality video options, Battlefield 3 renders its Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) using the Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO) algorithm. For performance reasons, the HBAO is rendered in half resolution using half-resolution input depths. The HBAO is then blurred in full resolution using a depth-aware blur. The main issue with such low-resolution SSAO rendering is that it produces objectionable flickering for thin objects (such as alpha-tested foliage) when the camera and/or the geometry are moving.
After a brief recap of the original HBAO pipeline, this talk describes a novel temporal filtering algorithm that fixed the HBAO flickering problem in Battlefield 3 with a 1-2% performance hit in 1920×1200 on PC (DX10 or DX11). The talk includes algorithm and implementation details on the temporal filtering part, as well as generic optimizations for SSAO blur pixel shaders. This is a joint work between Louis Bavoil (NVIDIA) and Johan Andersson (DICE).
TAKEAWAY: Attendees will learn about a simple temporal-filtering method that can fix SSAO flickering on thin geometry with a negligible performance hit, as well as generic SSAO-blur optimizations.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: This talk is addressed to graphics programmers who are familiar with writing post-processing pixel shaders in HLSL. Some knowledge on SSAO algorithms and DirectX 11 would help, but should not be required to follow the talk.
