Page 12 - Technology Demo Luna
The Technology Demo's
With new technology NVIDIA always released some pretty cool technology demo's. I talked with a couple of guys from the demo team not too long ago. It takes about 10 months to create a demo and they are working on this team, get this, with 10 people. To bring new demo's each year over and over again has to be a pretty hard task. Even more difficult is to keep up with the technology and still be original.
Two new demo's are being showcased for this G70 release, the first one (Luna) you could have seen at the PS3 demonstration at the E3 in Los Angeles in May 2005 and then the other one 'Mad Mike' which I'll get into in a bit.
Luna
Continuing the tradition of character based technology demo's like Dawn and Dusk the demo team created the complex Luna character. Strapped in a pretty tight wetsuit kind of clothing and amazing detail she is surrounded by three monsters. The polygon count in the scene is amazing as is the detail level from the models towards the surrounding walls. Let's have a look at NVIDIA's Spin:
Gatekeepers preside over the juncture that lies between the real and the etherealthat passage to dimensions beyond our own. In a spire soaring into a luminous void, this trio of sightless beings hover above a huge disembodied eye. Reorienting its unblinking gaze with impossibly large hands, they afford us a better view into its black aperture, dilating to reveal other worlds more mystifying than anything on our own prosaic plane. Together these three act as one, attendant to Luna, the high priestess of this ocular oracle. Transformed from the cold, white light of reality, Luna is a graceful siren, set to draw us into her twilight realm. With her warm green glow to guide us, she eagerly pursues the as-yetunimagined through the caverns of the collective subconscious. Abandon the safety of the familiar, and follow Luna to a vast playground of chaos. She has things to show you, things that must be seen to be believed.
Key Features being used in this demo are:
PixelShaders 3.0 - The second-generation pixel shading core can render fantastic effects in real time. Effects like the many layers of Lunas suit and the real-time refraction on the eyeball, which require more than 300 instructions with per-pixel branching and are computed in 64-bit color. Translucence - Not only can you see the faint red light transmitted through the surface of Lunas skin, you can also see the intense light transmitted through the gatekeepers bodies. The amount of light transmitted is computed based on the depth of the gatekeepers and the occluding bones and arteries that run through them.
Displacement Mapping - A new displacement mapping technique outlined in NVIDIAs GPU Gems 2 uses a volumetric texture to compute the surface, allowing displaced bumps to occlude one another.
Real-Time Hair - The fine hairs of Lunas head are modeled in geometry, simulated in real time, and shadowed based on the number of hairs between each pixel and the light. The result is a realistic shadowing volume rather than individual hairs that cast an overly dark shadow.
