Eric Wohllaib

Reindeer Engineer at Sucker Punch Productions

[Andrew Goldfarb @garfep]

So excited to finally announce Ghost of Yōtei!!!

We have SO much more to show, but for now I’m glad to reveal this first look and incredibly proud of our team. There is much more to come ⚔️🐺

https://t.co/2PuIUo6Nbs

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@swoorpious Apologies, I'm not on twitter too much these days, unfortunately. The rounded normals are from pushing the vertex normals of the grass blades away from the center a bit. After they get interpolated, they have a rounded look. No need for textures!

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

My GDC talk got uploaded to YouTube! https://t.co/x5TX0EJdAS

If you have any questions about grass rendering in Ghost of Tsushima, feel free to ask :)

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@DennisSmolek Awesome! I hope it goes well!

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@DennisSmolek Each texel of the tile's grass height and type textures are ~39cm across, but the tiles are much larger. You can see a screenshot of some tile debug draw here: https://t.co/DM5DRKUD2G

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@StylizedStation Hey, this is about my GDC talk! If you're looking for some clarifications about it, I answered some questions here: https://t.co/wRcEsiZNlR

And if you want to watch the whole talk for free, you can check it out here: https://t.co/ozQwd7pysV

Great thread!

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

My GDC talk got uploaded to YouTube! https://t.co/x5TX0EJdAS

If you have any questions about grass rendering in Ghost of Tsushima, feel free to ask :)

[festive vector @festivevector]

Guess what I can finally talk about the Sail Forth RELEASE DATE and it is 🚨🚨 RIGHT NOW!!! 🚨🚨

I've been working on this game for over 6 years, this doesn't even seem real lol. It would mean the world to me if you could share this! Link and thread about the game below 👇

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@bruceoberg I mean, they have legs now. Money well spent imo

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@m_ninepoints Have you ever stared at a sunset over the waves of the ocean and gotten really mad at the specular aliasing?

[Tor Frick @Snefer]

My #GDC22 talk about how we built the world of @AscentTheGame is now available for free on youtube!
https://t.co/4omwXy3rSJ

[Risto Jankkila @JankkilaRisto]

Our GDC talk is now on youtube. Thanks to everyone who came to see it and the q&a session afterwards!

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@prrrszalony I definitely had help from across the rendering team. If I had tried to do it alone, it would have just been me mumbling into the mic for 40 minutes haha

[jendrik illner @jendrikillner]

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 244 - July 17, 2022 https://t.co/7eod30RtPE

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@maessof91 minor, but once it was implemented, it was worth keeping around. I can talk more about our occlusion culling set up if you have questions about the specifics there.

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@maessof91 We reproject last frame's depth buffer into the current frame's screen space, then in the compute shader, we construct a very conservative bounding box in screen space for each grass blade. If that bounding box wouldn't be visible, we drop the blade. The perf wins were pretty...

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@timsoret complicated collision set up, like a spring system or something, it would be harder to solve for. But the stateless nature of the grass made that sort of set up impractical, anyway.

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@timsoret Do you mean the normals of the grass blade's geometry? The wind and collisions only change the facing of the grass blade, so the normals are calculated by evaluating the derivative of the blade's Bezier curve and crossing that with the facing direction. If we did a more...

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@EmilMeiton your suggestion we could have gotten grass closer to the edge, but to completely solve the problem, I think we'll have to do more.

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@EmilMeiton Thanks! I appreciate it. :)
It would definitely be possible to get the terrain to more closely match the geom that's authored on top of it, but with how low resolution the terrain is (1 vert every ~39cm), we'd run into interpolation issues with this kind of overhang. I bet with..

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@DennisSmolek but not one draw call per different grass type per rendered tile, which was much too expensive.

[Eric Wohllaib @ericwoh]

@DennisSmolek Ah, yeah, you're right, the low LOD version does use a different version of the VS/PS shaders than the high LOD version. We determine if a rendered terrain tile is high LOD or low LOD all together, then use the appropriate shaders. So one draw call per rendered terrain tile...