This course discusses the practical implementation of physically-principled reflectance models in interactive graphics and video games, in current practice as well as upcoming technologies. The course begins with the visual phenomena important to the perception of reflectance in real-world materials, which it uses as background for the underlying theory and derivation of common reflectance models. After introducing the current game development pipeline, from content creation to rendering, the course then discusses rendering techniques for implementing reflectance models in games --- with emphasis on real-world trade offs such as shader performance, content creation efficiency, resource size considerations, and overall rendering quality. The course will help a researcher understand constraints in the game development pipeline and it will help a game developer understand the physical phenomena underlying reflectance models.
Naty Hoffman is currently at Naughty Dog, working on next-generation Playstation 3 graphics technology for Sony Computer Entertainment. Previously, Naty worked at Westwood Studios as the lead graphics programmer on the online game "Earth & Beyond" and at Intel as the lead architect for the first MMX microprocessor. At Intel, Naty also helped define the SSE and SSE 2 instruction set extensions. Naty is particularly interested in physically-based real-time rendering methods, on which he has published several articles in game development books and magazines and taught tutorials at SIGGRAPH, I3D, GDC and Meltdown.
Jan is an Assistant Professor at the University College London. He is particularly interested in realistic shading and lighting, hardware-accelerated rendering, textures and reflection properties, and interactive computer graphics. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Max-Planck-Institut f"ur Informatik, Germany, a Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Erlangen, Germany and an MMath from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Jan has been a tutorial speaker on real-time shading at SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, and other venues.
Dan is a software design engineer on the D3D group at Microsoft, where he has worked for the last 6 year. While there, he has helped designed D3D 8.0,8.1,9.0 and the soon to be released D3D 10. Although Dan is the technology lead for Microsoft's HLSL (High Level Shading Language), he still finds time to speak at numerous graphics and gaming conferences such as GDC and I3D, and also stay involved in ongoing graphics research in real-time reflectance. His current areas of interest are anti aliasing and level of detail of reflectance models.