Shading in Valve’s Source Engine

SIGGRAPH 2006

Jason Mitchell
Valve
 Introduction
¾ World Lighting
• Radiosity Normal Mapping
• Specular Lighting
¾ Model lighting
• Irradiance Volume
• Half-Lambert
• Phong terms
¾ High Dynamic Range Rendering
• Tone mapping
• Autoexposure
¾ Color Correction
 Timeline

¾ Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source (November 2004)

• Baseline shading model we’ll present today
¾ Lost Coast (October 2005)
• High Dynamic Range Rendering
¾ Day of Defeat: Source (September 2005)
• Color Correction and HDR
¾ Half-Life 2: Episode One (June 2006)
• Phong shading
Episodic Content Î Incremental Technology

¾ The extensions to the baseline Half-Life 2 technology

have been shipped in subsequent products in the
year and a half since HL2 shipped.
• More efficient way to develop technology
• Delivers value to customers and licensees
¾ Shorten the delay between hardware availability and
game support
 Marketplace Context

See full survey at http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

 World Lighting with Radiosity

¾ Realism
¾ More forgiving than direct lighting only
• Avoids harsh lighting situations
• Less micro-management of light sources for content
production
• Can’t tune lights shot-by-shot like movies. Don’t
know what the shots are, and don’t want to take the
production time to do this
Direct lighting only
Radiosity lighting
 Normal Mapping

¾ Reusable high-frequency detail

¾ Higher detail than we can currently get from
triangles
¾ Works well with both diffuse and specular
lighting models
¾ Can now be made to integrate with radiosity
 Radiosity Normal Mapping

¾ We created this technique to efficiently address the

strengths of both radiosity and normal mapping
¾ In other engines, per-pixel lighting terms are often
accumulated one light at a time
• Multiple lights handled by summing multiple light contributions
within or between passes
¾ We express the full lighting environment in our novel
basis in order to effectively perform diffuse bump
mapping with respect to an arbitrary number of lights
¾ This is the key to shading in Valve’s Source engine
 Basis for Radiosity Normal Mapping

 1 1 1 
− , , 
 6 2 3 

 1 1 1   3 1 
− ,− ,   ,0 , 
 6 2 3   2 3 
 Computing Light map Values

¾ Traditionally, when computing light map values using a

radiosity preprocessor, a single color value is calculated
¾ In Radiosity Normal Mapping, compute light values for
each vector in our basis
• This triples light map storage, but we are willing to bear this cost
for the added quality and flexibility
 At the pixel level. . .

¾ Sample three light map colors, and blend between them

based on the transformed vector
float3 dp;
dp.x = saturate( dot( normal, bumpBasis[0] ) );
dp.y = saturate( dot( normal, bumpBasis[1] ) );
dp.z = saturate( dot( normal, bumpBasis[2] ) );
dp *= dp;

diffuseLighting = dp.x * lightmapColor1 +

dp.y * lightmapColor2 +
dp.z * lightmapColor3;
Light Maps Only
Variable Luxel Density

Coarser light maps used

in low frequency areas

High density typically

4”×4” luxels
Final Rendered Scene
 World Specular Lighting

¾ We use cube maps for specular lighting the world

¾ Designers place the sample locations for specular lighting
¾ Cube maps are pre-computed in-engine from the level
data using rendering
• Especially interesting for HDR, which we’ll discuss later
¾ World surfaces pick up the “best” cube map, or cube
maps can be manually assigned to surfaces to fix
boundary problems
Environment probes
placed in Level Editor
Specular on World Geometry
Diffuse Lighting Only
Specular from cube maps
 Other World Lighting

¾ There are a few other special cases

• Reflective and refractive water
• Special effects such as the Citadel Core in Episode One
• Some simple geometry which is just vertex lit
 Model Lighting

¾ Prior to Episode One, models (objects which aren’t

part of the immovable world geometry) used
primarily view-independent lighting terms:
• Two local diffuse lights with Half-Lambert
• Directional ambient term (ambient cube)
¾ Also cubic environment mapping terms
¾ These terms maxed out ps_2_0, which was our high
end when we shipped Half-Life 2 in November 2004
 Half Lambert
¾ Typically clamp
N·L to zero at the
terminator
¾ Half Lambert
scales the -1 to 1
cosine term (red
curve) by ½,
biases by ½ and
squares to pull the
light all the way
around (blue
curve)
¾ Another example of choosing a
forgiving lighting model Lambertian Term Half Lambert
¾ Similar to Exaggerated Shading
apaper by Rusinkiewicz et al
 Indirect Illumination in Games
¾ Quake III used a filtered sample
from a 3D array of ambient terms to
provide a constant ambient for a
given character [Hook99]
¾ MotoGP used a hemisphere lighting
model where bounced light from the
ground varied spatially throughout From [Hargreaves03]
the race track [Hargreaves03]
¾ Max Payne 2 stored linear 4-term
spherical harmonic coefficients for
use in lighting characters and other
moving geometry [Lehtinen06]
 Ambient Cube

¾ Pre-compute irradiance samples

throughout the environment
¾ 4’×4’×8’ density
¾ The set of samples is referred to in
the literature as an irradiance
volume [Greger98] and each
sample defines an irradiance
environment map [Ramamoorthi01] Directional Ambient Constant Ambient

¾ Directional ambient term which includes indirect light

¾ Lights beyond the first two can be added to the ambient cube
 Ambient Cube Basis
+y
¾ Six RGB lobes stored in shader constants
¾ More concise basis than first two orders of spherical -x
harmonics (nine RGB colors)
¾ Pixel shader constant store is currently a bottleneck, -z +z
though this eases quite a bit on ps_3_0 +x
¾ Developed in parallel with other techniques such as
[Ramamoorthi01] -y
float3 AmbientLight( const float3 worldNormal )
{
float3 nSquared = worldNormal * worldNormal;
int3 isNegative = ( worldNormal < 0.0 );
float3 linearColor;
linearColor = nSquared.x * cAmbientCube[isNegative.x] +
nSquared.y * cAmbientCube[isNegative.y+2] +
nSquared.z * cAmbientCube[isNegative.z+4];
return linearColor;
}
Comparison of Ambient Cube to Spherical Harmonics

Original Light Probes Irradiance Environment Valve Ambient

Maps from Cubes
[Ramamoorthi01]
Benefits of Half Lambert and Ambient Cube

+ + =

Lambert 1 Lambert 2 Constant Ambient Most Games

+ + =

Half Lambert 1 Half Lambert 2 Ambient Cube Source Models

Benefits of Half Lambert and Ambient Cube

Lambertian terms + constant ambient Half Lambert + ambient cube

 Extensions to Earlier Model Lighting

¾ When we shipped Half-Life 2, ps_2_0 was the most

advanced pixel shader model available
¾ In the spring of 2006, 40% of our users have hardware
which supports ps_2_b or higher
• Of the people who have played Episode One in the two
months since it has shipped, 62% have such hardware
¾ For Episode One and a recent update to Day of Defeat:
Source, we used these longer ps_2_b shaders to add
Phong terms to model lighting
 ps_2_b

¾ Shader model on ATI RADEON Xx00 parts

¾ Same programming model as ps_2_0 but with longer
shaders
• ps_2_0 – 64 alu and 32 texture
• ps_2_b – 512 total…any mix of alu and texture

¾ ATI RADEON Xx00 & X1x00 series

NVIDIA GeForce 6x00 & 7x000 series
 Phong Terms

¾ Compute Phong terms

for up to two local lights
¾ Can specify specular
exponent variations
across a model
• Currently, map blends
between specular
exponent of 1 and 150 Specular Exponent Specular Mask
¾ Modulate with scalar
mask channel and
tweakable Fresnel term
Episodic Alyx Shade Tree

Diffuse
Diffuse 11
*
Albedo
Albedo
Final
Final
Diffuse
Diffuse +

+
Diffuse
Diffuse 22 Total
Total
Diffuse
Diffuse

Phong
Phong Mask
Mask

Light
Light
source
source
parameters
parameters Final Lighting
Ambient
Ambient
Cube
Cube *
Specular
Specular
Raw
Raw Phong
Phong Term
Term

Phong
Phong
Exponent
Exponent

Fresnel
Fresnel
High Dynamic Range
Rendering in the
Source Engine
 High Dynamic Range

¾ A High Dynamic Range image is an image that has a

greater contrast range than can be shown on a
standard display device, or that can be captured with
a standard camera with just a single exposure
¾ High Dynamic Range rendering performs
intermediate operations such as shading in high
dynamic range space
¾ The rendered HDR results are then mapped to a
limited-range display
Real-World Sky at Multiple Exposures
Scene from Lost Coast at Multiple Exposures
 HDR Skybox

¾ Authored by painting multiple exposures of the sky to

allow for real-time exposure adjustment
 Authored Sources of HDR Illumination

¾ HDR sky box authored by painting multiple exposures

of the sky
• Start with seamless LDR sky texture and paint HDR
information from there
• We use a combination of Photoshop and HDRShop to make
edits / touchups at different exposure levels
• The industry has not addressed this issue adequately at this
point and there is an opportunity for a tool vendor to step up
and fix this
¾ Local lights with HDR values placed in levels
Generated Sources of HDR Illumination

¾ HDR light maps are generated offline using our

radiosity solver and stored in RGBE format. At run
time, these are stored in a 16bit per channel format
¾ HDR Cube maps are generated by the engine using
the HDR skybox as well as the HDR light sources and
the HDR light maps
• The result is that an object which reflecting the sun or some
other bright part of the scene, you will see this in the full
effect of the brightness in the reflection, which is one of the
key advantages of HDR rendering
HDR water reflection and refraction

LDR HDR
 Tone Mapping
¾ Very careful with linear versus gamma color spaces
¾ All shaders in our DirectX 9 code path are single-pass
¾ As a result, tone mapping can be performed during
normal rendering
• Simple subroutine added to the end of all pixel shaders
¾ This allows us to use 32-bit RGBA render targets
• No increase in render target memory footprint
• MSAA supported
• 60% of our total users see HDR rendering
• 82% of those who have played Episode One so far!
 Auto Exposure
¾ Running luminance histogram of post-tonemapped frame
• Update one bucket per frame
• More histogram buckets for low luminance values
¾ Each frame, we determine which output pixels fall within a
given range, tagging such pixels in the stencil buffer
¾ Use an asynchronous occlusion query to count pixels in range
¾ Full running histogram (not just a single average luminance) is
available to the CPU with no stalls
¾ Time averaging is used smooth out auto exposure adjustments
¾ Designers can also modify auto exposure and bloom across
different areas of a level or in connection with game events
A single bucket from the running histogram (shown in red)
Another bucket from the running histogram (shown in red)
 Implemented Multiple HDR Paths

¾ Floating point
• HDR textures and render targets are fp16
• Shipped this path, but it is not the one typically used
¾ Integer
• Render to 32 bit RGBA integer frame buffer
• Store HDR textures in fp16 (linear color space) when filtered
fp16 textures are supported.
• Store HDR textures in 4.12 linear color space otherwise.
• Had to implement this version along with floating point
version to support more hardware
 Float vs. Integer HDR Tradeoffs
¾ Floating Point
+ Pre-tone-mapping data available for blooming
+ General refraction mapping techniques preserve HDR information
- Requires floating-point alpha blending
- Hardware lacks precision to perform fixed function pixel fog
¾ Integer
+ Compatible with Multisample Antialiasing (MSAA)
+ Works on all DirectX 9 hardware (runs well even on ATI RADEON 9600)
+ Small performance hit relative to LDR
Half Life 2: Episode 1
Half Life 2: Episode 1
Half Life 2: Episode 1
Team Fortress 2: NPR + HDR!
Team Fortress 2: NPR + HDR!
Team Fortress 2: NPR + HDR!
Lost Coast
Demo
 Color Correction
¾ Color has been used in visual arts to evoke particular emotional
responses for millennia, and we can do the same in video games
¾ It is very natural to apply color correction to rendered images as a
post process, since we’re doing lots of image processing already
• Simply define a mapping from a one set of RGB triples to another
• We do this with a 323 volume texture lookup (sometimes several)
¾ Decouples color correction from the art or lighting of a given setting
¾ Useful for a variety of purposes
• Stylization
• Day for night
• Gameplay
 Color Correction in Source

¾ Color correction in games can go beyond what is

possible in film
¾ The dynamic nature of games is both a curse and a
blessing
• More difficult to tweak to specific scenes
• Far more potential to exploit the dynamic nature of games
• Strong feedback loops with the player
• Additional sideband communication with the player
¾ Color correction is a powerful tool for art direction
• Mod authors and licensees can differentiate their titles
 Desaturation

Original Image Desaturated

 Future Directions

¾ Improvements to
irradiance volume
sampling
¾ Shadow Mapping
¾ Foliage Rendering
¾ Soft Particles
¾ Non-Photorealistic
rendering in Team
Fortress 2
 Conclusion
¾ World Lighting
• Radiosity Normal Mapping
• Specular Lighting
¾ Model lighting
• Irradiance Volume
• Half-Lambert
• Phong terms
¾ High Dynamic Range Rendering
• Tone mapping
• Autoexposure
¾ Color Correction
 SDK & Academic Licensing
¾ Publicly available SDK
¾ Academic licenses provide
• Access to Valve games
• Source code
• HLSL shaders, Radiosity and visibility calculations
• AI system, path finding
• Animation system, acting system, inverse kinematics
• Production quality art and sound assets
• Useful level and modeling tools
• Hammer level editor, Faceposer, Model viewing utilities

[email protected]
 Acknowledgements

¾ Many thanks to Gary McTaggart, Chris Green,

James Grieve, Brian Jacobson, Ken Birdwell,
Bay Raitt and the rest of the folks at Valve who
contributed to this material and the
engineering behind it
¾ Thanks also to Paul Debevec for the light
probes used in the comparison with
Ramamoorthi’s Irradiance Environment Maps
 References
¾ [Debevec00] Paul Debevec, Personal Communication, 2000.
¾ [Diefenbach97] Paul J. Diefenbach, “Multi-pass Pipeline Rendering: Realism For Dynamic
Environments,” Proceedings, 1997 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 1997.
¾ [Franke06] Scott Franke, Personal Communication, 2006.
¾ [Green06] Chris Green and Gary McTaggart, “High Performance HDR Rendering on DX9-
Class Hardware,” Poster presented at the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics
and Games, March, 2006.
¾ [Greger98] Gene Greger, Peter Shirley, Philip M. Hubbard and Donald P. Greenberg,
“The Irradiance Volume,” IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 18(2):32-43, 1998.
¾ [Hargreaves03] Shawn Hargreaves, “Hemisphere Lighting with Radiosity Maps”,
Gamasutra, August 2003.
¾ [Hook99] Brian Hook, “The Quake 3 Arena Rendering Architecture,” Game Developer’s
Conference 1999.
¾ [Lehtinen06] Jaakko Lehtinen, Personal Communication, 2006.
¾ [McTaggart04] Gary McTaggart, “Half-Life 2 Shading,” GDC Direct3D Tutorial 2004.
¾ [Ramamoorthi01] Ravi Ramamoorthi and Pat Hanrahan, “An Efficient Representation for
Irradiance Environment Maps,” SIGGRAPH 2001, pages 497-500.
¾ [Rusinkiewicz06] Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Michael Burns, and Doug DeCarlo. “Exaggerated
Shading for Depicting Shape and Detail,” ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc.
SIGGRAPH). 25(3) July 2006.
 Questions?

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