Date: Monday 7th March 2005
Start & End Time: 10:00am – 6:00pm
Title: Advanced Visual Effects with Direct3D
ATI Speakers: Jason Mitchell, Richard Huddy, Natalya Tatarchuk
Description:
Brought to you with the collaboration of the industry's
leading hardware and software vendors, this day-long tutorial
provides an in-depth look at the Direct3D technologies in DirectX
9 and how they can be applied to cutting-edge game graphics.
After a review of the latest API improvements and shader models,
a variety of special effects which illustrate their use in game
content are discussed and demonstrated. This includes detailed
presentations from ATI’s demo team as well as top game
developers who ship real games into the marketplace.
In addition to illustrating the details of rendering advanced
real-time visual effects, this tutorial covers a series of vendor-neutral
optimizations that developers need to keep in mind when designing
their engines and shaders.
Date: Tuesday 8th March 2005
Start & End Time: 10:00am – 6:00pm
Title: Next Generation Rendering With OpenGL.
ATI Speakers: Evan Hart, Bill Licea-Kane
Description:
Brought to you with the collaboration of the industry's
leading graphics hardware vendors, this day-long tutorial provides
an in-depth look at the latest technologies in OpenGL, and how
they can be applied to next generation game graphics. The tutorial
includes detailed descriptions of the latest features of OpenGL
2.0 and the latest extensions, followed by several case-studies
of new rendering effects that are enabled by these features.
The tutorial also focuses on optimizing shaders for maximum interactive
performance.
Date: Wednesday 9th March 2005
Start & End Time: 9:00am – 10:00am
Title: DirectX Graphics Performance - getting every bit you
can.
Speaker: Richard Huddy
Description:
A cold and objective look at the performance aspects
of DirectX games from the basic guidelines of what to do and
why, though the all too often subtle interactions of programming
techniques, and ending with a close look at a small handful of
those special apps that either fail or achieve in a spectacular
way. Most importantly you’ll leave with a handful of recommendations
that allow you to detect and cure the commonest failings of 90%
of the cases that games developers meet.
Speaker’s Bio:
Richard Huddy has managed the European
Developer Relations group within ATI since the summer of 2002
and has worked in games for more than 14 years. For most of that
time, he has specialized in high-performance 3D graphics. He
worked with both RenderMorphics and Criterion Software developing
their low-level APIs before moving on to work as a device driver
writer specializing in Direct3D optimization. Immediately before
joining ATI, Richard spent four years at NVIDIA running their
European Developer Relations team. Richard's primary focus is
now teaching game programmers how to get the best from modern
high-performance architectures using Direct3D. Richard has been
a regular contributor at Microsoft's Meltdown conferences and
taught at the annual GDC, GDCE, EDF and Creativity events. He
lives in England and is proud of that fact.
Session Track: Programming
Date: Wednesday 9th March 2005
Start & End Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Title: Precomputed Radiance Transfer and Spherical Harmonic
Lighting Techniques for Games
Speaker: Chris Oat
Description: Pre-computed Radiance Transfer (PRT) and Spherical
Harmonic (SH) based lighting solutions have entered the mainstream
of real-time graphics. This relatively new lighting technique
offers many advantages to engine programmers in both performance
and advanced lighting realism. Pre-sampled irradiance and irradiance
gradients for non-distant, mid-range lighting will be discussed
along with methods for using PRT with dynamic, deformable geometry.
This presentation will also cover lighting algorithms that mix
PRT with more traditional lighting techniques.
Speaker's Bio:
Chris Oat is a senior software engineer in the
3D Application Research Group at ATI where he explores novel
rendering techniques for real-time 3D graphics applications.
As a member of ATI's demo team, his focus is on shader development
for current and future graphics platforms. He has published several
articles in the ShaderX and Game Programming Gems series and
has presented at game developer conferences around the world.
Session Track: Programming
Date: Wednesday 9th March 2005
Start & End Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Title: Bringing Hollywood to Real-time
Speaker: Abe Wiley
Description:
Artists face a variety of issues when designing
art that pushes the limits of next generation hardware, as the
market demands that games look more and more like films yet still
render in real time. This talk looks at techniques for taking
Hollywood style effects intended for film and recreating them
on next generation graphics hardware.
The talk will address issues faced by ATI's 3D Application
Research Group's art team in the creation of the Ruby demos
which were
created in partnership with RhinoFX, a film and video post-production
house. Topics discussed will include communication challenges
between a film house and a real-time house, the production
pipeline which evolved, and specific solutions for creating
a cinematic
look using graphics hardware.
Speaker’s Bio:
Abe Wiley is a 3D Artist in ATI’s
3D Application Research Group where he works on graphics demos
as part of ATI’s Demo Team. Abe recently joined ATI after
4 years in the game industry where he worked as a 3D artist and
animator at Impressions Games, a Cambridge MA based game development
company that focused on Real Time Strategy Games. Prior to that,
he worked for The Big Machine as a 3D artist and animator on
several television spots, including Station ID animations for
The Discovery Channel. Abe received his BFA degree in Computer
Graphics from Syracuse University.
Session Track: Visual Arts
Date: Wednesday 9th March 2005
Start & End Time: 4:00pm – 6:15pm
(short break at 5:00pm)
Title: Effects Breakdown - How’d
They Do That
Speakers: Thorsten Scheuermann, Natalya Tatarchuk, Daniel Ginsburg
Description:
As graphics hardware becomes more powerful it has
become increasingly difficult for programmers and artists to
figure out just what to do with all of it. In this talk, the
demo team from ATI describes a number of practical effects from
past and future demos that take advantage of leading edge hardware.
Note: This talk overlaps with the booth crawl in the exhibition.
To ensure that attendees don’t miss out on valuable drinking
time, beer will be provided during the break.
Speaker Bio’s:
Thorsten Scheuermann is a senior
software engineer in ATI’s
3D Application Research Group where he works on graphics demos
and novel rendering techniques as part of ATI’s Demo Team.
He has published articles in ShaderX3 and Game Programming Gems
5 and has given presentations at GDC and SIGGRAPH. Prior to working
at ATI Thorsten was a member of the Effective Virtual Environments
research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. Thorsten received a Master’s degree in Computer Science
from UNC and previously studied at the University of Karlsruhe
in Germany.
Natalya is a Senior Software Engineer in the ATI’s 3D
Application Research Group where she is investigating innovative
graphics techniques in the real-time domain for current and future
platforms as a contributor in the demo group. In the past she
has been the lead for the tools group at the 3D Application Research
Group, working on a pioneering real-time shader development environment
RenderMonkeyTM IDE. Natalya has been in the graphics industry
for many years, previously working on award-winning haptic 3D
modeling software, scientific visualization libraries and various
other projects. She has published articles in the ShaderX books,
Game Programming Gems, Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com,
amongst others. She has presented novel techniques at various
conferences throughout the world, including Siggraph sketches
and presentations, GDC, GDC-Europe, Microsoft Meltdown and Russian
GDCs. Natalya graduated with BAs in Computers Science and Mathematics
from Boston University and is currently pursuing an MS in Computer
Science with concentration in Graphics at Harvard University.
Dan Ginsburg is currently a Senior Software Engineer on the
demo team in the 3D Application Research Group at ATI Research,
where he works on the launch demos for ATI cards. Prior to joining
the 3DARG, Dan worked on the OpenGL driver team for over four
years, focusing most of his efforts on implementing new extensions.
He has worked on features for the Rage128 and Radeon-series OpenGL
drivers including cubemaps, 3-D textures, full-scene anti-aliasing,
fragment shaders, and GLSL. He has also participated in specifying
several OpenGL extensions that have been approved by the Architecture
Review Board (ARB). Prior to joining ATI, Dan worked for n-Space,
Inc., an Orlando-based game development company. Dan graduated
with a BS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute
and is currently pursuing an MBA part-time at Bentley College.
Session Track: Programming
