Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games – SIGGRAPH 2010.
Siggraph’s courses are excellent, and definitely one of the main reasons to attend the conference. This particular course has been presented at Siggraph since 2006, and the slides for the 2010 edition are freely available.
The summary reads:
“Advances in the real-time graphics research and the ever-increasing power of mainstream GPUs and consoles continues generating an explosion of innovative algorithms suitable for fast, interactive rendering of complex and engaging virtual worlds.
Every year the latest video games display a vast variety of sophisticated algorithms resulting in ground-breaking 3D rendering pushing the visual boundaries and interactive experience of rich environments. The focus of this course lies in bridging the game development community and the state-of-the-art 3D graphics research, encouraging cross-pollination of knowledge for future games and other interactive applications.
This course is the next instalment in the now-established series of Siggraph courses on real-time rendering, bringing the newest and best of graphics practices and research from the game development community, and providing practical and production-proven algorithms.
This year the course includes speakers from the makers of award-winning games, such as Bungie, Valve, DICE, Crytek, Avalanche / Disney, Naughty Dog; middleware providers such as Geomerics; and the leading IHVs such as AMD and Intel. The talks will cover wide range of relevant topics such as character rendering and shading models, global illumination, shadowing solutions, a plethora of practical production systems for game development, such as artist-directable water flow pipeline, destructible environments, and particle effects.”
Syllabus
Introduction: Graphics Feature Development for Games
Natalya Tatarchuk (Bungie)
Rendering techniques in Toy Story 3
John-Paul Ownby, Robert Hall and Christopher Hall (Avalanche / Disney)
A Real-Time Radiosity Architecture for Video Game
Sam Martin (Geomerics), Per Einarsson (DICE)
Real-Time Order Independent Transparency and Indirect Illumination using Direct3D 11
Jason Yang, Jay McKee (AMD)
CryENGINE 3: Reaching the Speed of Light
Anton Kaplanyan (Crytek)
Sample Distribution Shadow Maps
Andrew Lauritzen (Intel)
You can find more information, straight from the source, in here. A more recent paper from I3D 2011, plus code.
Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps
Marco Salvi (Intel)
Further information and code available in here.
Uncharted 2: Character Lighting and Shading
John Hable (Naughty Dog)
Destruction Masking in Frostbite 2 using Volume Distance Fields
Robert Kihl (DICE)
Water Flow in Portal 2
Alex Vlachos (Valve)
Kyle Hayward (Graphics Runner Blog) has a small tutorial and an implementation based on this talk.
The HPC/Visualisation group from the University of Groningen also has a demo for the water shader, complete with source code and images.