You've been logged out of GDC Vault since the maximum users allowed for this account has been reached. To access Members Only content on GDC Vault, please log out of GDC Vault from the computer which last accessed this account.

Click here to find out about GDC Vault Membership options for more users.

close

The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Ambient Occlusion Fields and Decals in Infamous 2
Speaker(s): Nathan Reed
Company Name(s): Sucker Punch Productions
Track / Format: Programming

Did you know free users get access to 30% of content from the last 2 years?


Get your team full access to the most up to date GDC content

Overview:

Standard methods for ambient occlusion in games are either fully precomputed - baking AO onto vertices or lightmaps - or fully dynamic, i.e. SSAO. Both are useful, but we complement them with a hybrid approach that avoids some weaknesses of baked AO and SSAO. We present AO Fields and AO Decals, a pair of techniques developed for Sucker Punch's recent game Infamous 2. These render plausible contact shadows and self-occlusion for movable objects; rendering is fast, and only a few kilobytes per unique object are needed for precomputed data.

This talk will explain the implementation details of AO fields and decals, including the authoring model exposed to artists, how we fix up corner cases and artifacts, and what kind of texture compression we use. We will show screenshots and videos of the techniques, and report on performance and memory usage in Infamous 2.

GDC 2012

Nathan Reed

Sucker Punch Productions

free content

Programming

Programming