In this presentation Nicolas Trudel, a Graphics Programmer from Eidos-Montréal describes how they integrated Umbra in their custom made Dawn Engine to improve geometry culling for their latest game. Slides also include a short description of Umbra in general for Sampo Lappalainen, and also a future roadmap from the company's CEO Otso Mäkinen.

1. Improving geometry culling for Deus Ex : Mankind
Divided
GDC 2016
Otso Mäkinen Sampo
Lappalainen
Nicolas Trudel

3. 100 GB
MANUAL WORK FROM
EXPERTS
100 MB

4. WHY UMBRA?
BETTER
FRAME RATES
LARGER AND
MORE DETAILED
LEVELS
AUTOMATES
MANUAL WORK
ALL PLATFORMS

5. OCCLUSION CULLING

6. UMBRA OCCLUSION CULLING OVERVIEW
POLYGON SOUP VISIBLE OBJECTS
Pre-process Visibility
query
SPATIAL DATABASE

7. Glossary
Object types
Occluder
Target
Gate
Volume
Tome
Umbra’s spatial database

8. POLYGON SOUP

9. VOXELS

10. CELLS AND PORTALS

11. VISIBILITY QUERY
Rasterize portal graph

12. OCCLUSION BUFFER

13. RAYCAST & SPATIAL CONNECTIVITY
Raycast
AI spatial awareness
Spawn locations
Audio occlusion
Spatial connectivity
Topological distance
Scripted event activation
Audio propagation

14. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Eidos-Montreal Studio
14
History
 Founded in 2007
 Located in…you guessed it!
 Focus on mature AAA games
 Games developed
 Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)
 Tomb Raider (2013) – Multiplayer Mode
 Thief (2014)
 Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015) – Co-developer
 Deus Ex : Mankind Divided
 Labs department : R&D tech for multiple studios/games
v

15. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Dawn Engine
Evolution of technology
 Heavily modified version of IO Interactive’s Glacier™ 2 engine
 Tailored for the needs of Deus Ex franchise
 Middlewares used:
 Umbra
 PhysX
 APEX
 Bink
 Scaleform
 FMOD
 Nav Power
v

16. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Dawn Engine - Rendering v
Tiled lighting
 Deferred lighting for opaque
 Forward lighting for transparent
Temporal anti-aliasing
 fixes a lot of the specular flickering, and smooth out smaller details
in objects
Temporal ambient occlusion
 Also gave us the best results. Computing ambient occlusion half
res, then upsampling over multiple frames

17. Visuals Examples
Copyright © 2016 Square Enix & Eidos-Montreal. All Rights Reserved

18. Example Scene
WITHOUT TAA

19. Example Scene
WITH TAA

20. Example Scene
SSAO

21. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Dawn Engine - Rendering
Reflection
 Using SSR with localized cubemaps
Global illumination
 No lightmaps
 Baking data with spherical harmonics
 Per pixel lighting for opaque
 1 probe per object for transparent
 Probes placement: multi-levels, variable density
v

22. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING 22
Dawn Engine - Rendering v
Hair
 Developed by Labs
 Improved Version of TressFX (see GDC 2015 Presentation)

23. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING

24. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Deus Ex : Mankind Divided
Game Information
 Release date: August 23rd, 2016
 Urban areas, both indoor and outdoor
 Artistic vision: create a tangible anticipation, as much with our
lighting & material process, as with crafting highly cluttered
environments
 Our biggest level is 1 km2, 300M polys
v

25. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Occlusion Culling
Before using Umbra
 Placement of portals by hand
 Too tedious for map sizes
 Difficult to know where to place portals
 Fallback on frustum culling
Motivations for another method
 Automation
 Faster queries
v

26. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Tools
 Umbra parameters, adjustable per scene
 By default, whole scene taken into account
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

27. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING 27
Tools
 Regions of interest (view volumes)
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

28. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING 28
Tools
 Regions of interest
 Usage of volumes
 Allows to adjust parameters for a particular region
 Visibility options on objects
 Static
 Occluder
 Occluder only
 Dynamic
 Baking
 In-editor or standalone
 Automatized by build machines
 Baking time: ~20 minutes
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

29. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING 29
Tools
 Baking
 One tome per scene: no streaming
 Except one level split in two
 Umbra scene and tome data between 15-50 mb
 Had to create unique ID per object
 Transparent objects (objects with at least one transparent
material)
 How to keep one unique ID per object?
 Add opaque primitives with object ID == 0, as occluders
 Add all primitives with unique object ID, as targets
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

30. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Runtime
 Portal Queries
 Main camera
 Shadow maps: most of our lights are static
 Water reflection
 Rain accessibility
 Some post filters
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

31. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Runtime
 Occlusion buffers
 Generated from queries on static entities
 Then used to accelerate queries for dynamic entities
 Cache
 Used for camera independent queries
 Client gives a cache ID
 The cache is composed of
 Pointer to occlusion buffer
 List of visible nodes
 Invalidate cache when:
 Registering static entities (could be optimized)
 Shadow caster data changes (mostly editor)
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

32. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Integrating Umbra in Dawn Engine
Cache
Client Client Client
Umbra
Static Query Static Query
Static Query
DynamicQuery
(object grid and occlusion buffer)
Client

33. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Runtime
 Dynamic objects
 Octree used to store them
 Occlusion buffer used to determine visible cells
 If cell visible, test on objects
 When no occlusion buffer
 Same done, but with frustum test
 Octree also used for static objects not registered to Umbra
 Sky domes, vistas
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

34. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Runtime
 Parallelism
 Portal queries are split in 4 jobs
 Result is merged
 Object list
 Occlusion buffer
Global illumination
 Baking offline
 Hundreds of thousands of probes
 First, simple frustum test
 Could not use portal queries
 Umbra frustum queries improved bake time
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

35. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Integrating Umbra in Dawn Engine
DEBUGGING TOOLS

36. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Frozen Culling - Frustum
DEBUGGING TOOLS

37. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Frozen Culling - Umbra
DEBUGGING TOOLS

38. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Challenges
 Umbra integrated when lots of assets were already created
 At first, too many objects were tagged occluder
 Reduced tome size by half
 Reduced bake time by half
 Sometimes difficult to determine if occluder or not
 Context dependent
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

39. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
CHALLENGES

40. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
CHALLENGES

41. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Challenges
 Voxelization settings
 Trade-off between performance/memory and result
 Lots of small holes in some maps
 Reducing detail in lots of sections => micro manage volumes to
increase detail
 Air vents
 Usage of occluder only
vIntegrating Umbra in Dawn Engine

42. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
CHALLENGES

43. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
BENCHMARKS

44. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
BENCHMARKS

45. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
 Simple frustum culling:
 6 fps
 6200 draw calls
 With Umbra:
 30 fps
 2600 draw calls
 Queries (typical frame)
 Main Camera: 4ms (static: 2ms, dynamic: 2ms)
 Shadow Casters : 1.4ms (7 shadows casters,
dynamic)
v
IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
PS4 Benchmarks

46. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Improvements
46
 Bake part of the scene
 Have a kind of level of detail for voxelization
 Have volumes to exclude voxelization data
 Be able to see the voxelization
v

47. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Eidos-Montréal is hiring
Eidos-Montréal is always looking for the best talent.
At Eidos-Montréal, you'll find a team of talented and
passionate people who aim for the best and are
determined to achieve their goals.
v www.eidosmontreal.com

48. IMPROVING GEOMETRY CULLING
Any 3D Content, Any Device

49. FEATURES
FASTER
PRE-PROCESS
IMPROVED
CULLING
MORE ROBUST – LESS
TWEAKING
UMBRA 3.4
soon
OCCLUSION
CULLING
SPATIAL
CONNECTIVITY
RAYCAST
QUERY
UMBRA 3.3
now
VISIBILITY-BASED
3D STREAMING AND
OPTIMIZATION
UMBRA 4.0
Q3–Q4

52. 4.0 Overview

54. Streaming and Rendering of Large 3D Worlds

55. It all starts with the user
(e.g. game designer) creating 3D worlds.
How It Works

56. With their tool of choice (Unity, Unreal etc.),
they can “umbrafy” these worlds.
This means that they are sent to
the Umbra Cloud...
...or the Umbra Optimizer on
a local computer.

57. Umbra then
automatically
restructures
the data...
... and creates an
optimized database
that is stored
locally or in the
Umbra Cloud.

58. When the game,
is running,
Umbra will...
...tell what to
render next with
3D content
streaming
...report what
is visible with
occlusion culling
...define which
version of assets
to use (level
of detail)

59. Questions & Answers
Thank you for your time & see you next year.