Tiger Woods 2008: Advancements in Environments Peter Arisman Technical Art Director Tiger Woods 2008

Tiger Woods 2008: Advancements in Environments New game for Tiburon  Need to rebuild entire hole to iterate  Hand-editing xml  No sharing of common assets  Unexposed shaders Resolution  Implemented faster Art pipelines  Shader Exposition

Faster Art pipelines Iteration is everything Allows artists to create rather than wait Key to speeding up iteration is a technology called Flap

FLAP Real-time tuning technology  Hot swap textures  Detect & reload changed assets  Real-time shader & game parameter editing

Stay Tuned Pull Flap changes back into Maya Flap is no longer a one-way street  Flap writes changed parameters to xml  Stay Tuned reads xml, opens Maya and applies relevant changes

Replace Ace Object replacement for Maya References can be problematic in Maya 7  Script keeps track of an item’s master asset  Allows one to replace the current instance with the refreshed master at any time  Can be run unattended in pipeline to update all scene’s assets prior to export

Shader Improvements Hard coded shaders! Difficult to edit - required rebuild Shaders were exposed allowing TAs to rapidly experiment & implement

Shader Improvements  Advanced foliage shader  Detail maps  Anisotropic filtering

Foliage Shader The key to the foliage shader is the occlusion sphere.  Sphere shaped trees  Artist sets the position in the shader  Unusually shaped trees  Multiple Spheres  The vertex colors store the normals used by the lighting, as well as the length for the darkening core

Foliage Shader

Detail Textures for Terrain Add detail when terrain is viewed close up Denser UVs close up shots.

Detail Textures for Terrain Old Green New Green

Anisotropic Filtering Anisotropic filtering skews the sample grid according to the viewing angle.

Anisotropic Filtering Old Fairway New Fairway

Other Improvements…  Sorted Alpha in foliage  Full-frame post effects  Terrain degradation pass  High-resolution shadow maps  Ambient occlusion maps  Offline optimization of index buffers  Blended material boundaries  Special sauce…

Results

Results Tiger ‘07

Results Tiger ‘08

Ideas for Next Year… You Bet!

Thank You Peter Arisman Technical Art Director Tiger Woods 2008

Texture Tile Randomization Tiling is apparent when course is viewed from above Texture Tiling fix - Divides the texture into 4 or more sectors and randomly chooses these quadrants across the UV space of the object, eliminating repeating tile patterns visible at a distance. Using sectors of a single texture is faster than using separate textures and conditional logic, but creates artifacts as the bilinear filter blends the wrong pixels at the UV boundary. As a solution the texture is lerped with a non-randomized version of itself at these boundaries.

Gamma Correction Textures are authored against the monitor’s gamma curve Shaders are computed in linear space Textures are moved into linear space, operated on, and converted back to gamma in the shader