[Devblog] DirectX 11 Tessellation Tech Demo at Fanfest 2012

[Itiken]

awaiting flying permanently exploding / recombining ship bug

[randomToon]

So not like, half exploded battleships and stuff after a battle?

You're probably talking about this:

I jizzed at the different ship skins, something that eve has been missing for far too long.

Then you should probably change your undies and start stocking up aurum.

[randomToon]

The horrible thing about this is that Jon Lander said before the presentation:
"What we're about to show you is really really cool but we won't implement/ develop it unless you guys want it"

then the shiny presentation happened with all fractal asteroids and silly numbers of polygons (which, to it's credit was bloody awesome)

Then Jon Lander turned up at the end and asked the audience of a few thousand people: "So do you want this, guys?" and of course there was thunderous applause and yelling by people swept up by that weird obligation people seem to have to agree with everyone who's making the most noise.

So yeah, now we don't even have an excuse to rail against it when it's an obvious waste of time and resources because "we" asked for it. GG

CCP confirming their preconceptions? Well I never!

[dzajic]

I just don't get tessellation. More polys is always nice, but we are talking about enormous increase here. I mean, nVidia and DAAMIT love it as it gives them excuse to sell new high range GPUs but otherwise... Better sculpted base model wouldn't eat as much resources and look better. Content creator can not give a fuck and make relatively low poly models and then GPU comes with tessellation and creates 100x more polys out of thin air (out of low poly source model).

[Daneel Trevize]

Until almost everyone has the tech, it can't be for game mechanics, only shiny shit.

[Mike deVoid]

If it delays new POSes then no.

[Joshua Foiritain]

I just don't get tessellation. More polys is always nice, but we are talking about enormous increase here. I mean, nVidia and DAAMIT love it as it gives them excuse to sell new high range GPUs but otherwise... Better sculpted base model wouldn't eat as much resources and look better. Content creator can not give a fuck and make relatively low poly models and then GPU comes with tessellation and creates 100x more polys out of thin air (out of low poly source model).

iirc; It uses normal mapping to calculate where bumps and gaps should be and uses that to create the new polys. It actually works quite well as it simply replaces the fake 2d depth you normally see with actual 3d model depth.

Though yes; a modeler could do it better but it would cost absurd amounts of time to create such a level of detail.

The entire idea behind tessellation is that when your engine can render ~500k triangles at once its kind of silly to only actually render ~1000 if you're the only ship on grid. Obviously they cant create a ship with ~500k triangles because then they'd need an absurd amount of LOD models to use when multiple ships are on grid and it would take hilarious amounts of time to actually make.

Tessellation allows that unused engine power to be put to use.

Note; used numbers are examples made up out of thin air to illustrate the example.

[Daneel Trevize]

iirc; It uses normal mapping to calculate where bumps and gaps should be and uses that to create the new polys. It actually works quite well as it simply replaces the fake 2d depth you normally see with actual 3d model depth.

Though yes; a modeler could do it better but it would cost absurd amounts of time to create such a level of detail

How do you think the detail got into the bump map/textures in the first place...
Even the recent CCP vid showed high-poly models are baked with the lighting to form the low-poly ones + maps/textures. Unless I'm mistaken.

I think you're right about dynamic levels of detail depending on GPU load.

Tesselation should be especially good for procedurally-generated content iirc.

[Verite Rendition]

I just don't get tessellation. More polys is always nice, but we are talking about enormous increase here. I mean, nVidia and DAAMIT love it as it gives them excuse to sell new high range GPUs but otherwise... Better sculpted base model wouldn't eat as much resources and look better. Content creator can not give a fuck and make relatively low poly models and then GPU comes with tessellation and creates 100x more polys out of thin air (out of low poly source model).

Actually the source models are high poly. You need a high poly model to properly generate the normal maps. In theory CCP won't have to do much on the art side because they already have the high poly models, and it's just a matter of generating the displacement maps for tessellation.

Anyhow I'm totally looking forward to this, assuming CCP goes ahead with it. It's about time they got a DX10+ renderer; there's a lot of neat little things they can do to improve the efficiency of the rendering engine.

[Lana Torrin]

So not like, half exploded battleships and stuff after a battle?

You're probably talking about this:

I jizzed at the different ship skins, something that eve has been missing for far too long.

Then you should probably change your undies and start stocking up aurum.

You failed to give me warning on who this was.. Loaded youtube, played an advert.. advert finished.. saw who it was, punched screen..

Fortunately this screen isn't attached to anything and it just fell over without being damaged.

Now what was he supposed to be trying to say before I reacted violently to even the sight of him? That we will have to purchase skins with aurum? I thought that was already known.

[Sparq]

Well, it'll be a buff to ship spinning.

I'm looking forward to the refreshed ship models, especially for the Gallente frigates.

[Cerbus]

people in the thread who actually know what they're talking about, must be a pink name thing?

Some V3'd ships have Ambient Occlusion maps pre-baked but there is little lighting directly applied to the diffuse textures.
Tesselation is highly scalable and you can turn it completely off.

Posters above are correct the process is basically like this:

-> design high poly model
-> paint high res textures (seperated into diffuse, specular, lighting (both internal ship lights and exhaust lights) and 2x paint layers (Highlights and Accents on your ship)
-> bake optional lighting/ ambient occlusion maps from high res model and lighting solutions
-> create normal map from high poly model (like an advanced bump map but more magical)

-> create two new lower quality ship models from the high poly model (medium and low versions)
-> Convert / Package the high res textures into 3x predefined .dds files
--> (1) diffuse texture (2) Normal Map (3) Paint Layer 1, Paint Layer 2, Specular Map, Lights
----> These .dds files contain multiple mipmap levels of each texture (multiple resolution versions of the same texture), the level of quality is controlled/ loaded based on your LOD and other graphical settings - the highest quality mipmap level is usually 1024x1024
-> create optional lighting .dds files for ambient occlusion

The tessellation uses the normal map and some shader trickery to increase the triangles/ quality of the medium and low resolution models that we see ingame on the fly.
End result is a much more controllable level of detail without having to actually have high poly models in your client files.

etc.

I'm not 100% sure, but there does need to be a little fiddling with existing models to get them to work correctly but I'd need someone at CCP to confirm.


Can't wait.

The damage effects they're showing with the opacity and texture effects is pretty sweet too

[filingo]

why are they doing this when they could be fixing lag

[Sparq]

why are they doing this when they could be fixing lag

[Cerbus]

the tattoos they've made look sweet too, fuck the lag make stuff that no-one else but yourself will ever see.

[randomToon]

So not like, half exploded battleships and stuff after a battle?

You're probably talking about this:

I jizzed at the different ship skins, something that eve has been missing for far too long.

Then you should probably change your undies and start stocking up aurum.

You failed to give me warning on who this was.. Loaded youtube, played an advert.. advert finished.. saw who it was, punched screen..

Fortunately this screen isn't attached to anything and it just fell over without being damaged.

Now what was he supposed to be trying to say before I reacted violently to even the sight of him? That we will have to purchase skins with aurum? I thought that was already known.

It was expected that CCP will go for another blatant money grab and try to sell ship skins for aurum, but now it has been officially confirmed.
As T'amber's survey indicates most people would much rather pay for ship skins with ISK, but, as always, CCP knows best.

Also - hardware accelerated tessellation isn't new. I actually used to play Unreal Tournament with TruForm mod. Obviously this technology is much more refined than it used to be in 2001, but it's not as innovative as Nvidia and CCP would like everyone to believe.

[depili]

I remember there being some tessellation support in Morrowind also.

[Verite Rendition]

The tessellation uses the normal map and some shader trickery

To be clear a displacement map is not a normal map; you can't do geometry modification for tessellation with the latter. However the two are similar in nature.

[Jarnis]

Tessellation as a concept is very old and yes, some age old ATI hardware had it present but those versions were extremely primitive compared to the version we got in DirectX 11. Almost no games supported it back then either as it was vendor-specific stuff not available through the standard DirectX API. DirectX 11 fixed that bit as well.

Also today's cards can push so utterly ridiculous amounts of triangles around that it is now perfectly feasible - a moderate amount of tessellation is effectively "free" with modern cards. They just can draw so much stuff that setting up the scene and all that (CPU/driver side) is holding things back, so there is plenty of capacity to render extra detail that is generated on the card itself (no need to get CPU involved for those extra triangles)

[FatFreddy]

the tattoos they've made look sweet too, fuck the lag make stuff that no-one else but yourself will ever see.

eeeeeeOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEOOOOEeeeeeee

that was my generic kitsch siren