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Decima Engine rendering techniques shown off during Siggraph 2017

At Siggraph 2017, a computer graphics conference held in Los Angeles July 30 – August 3, Giliam de Carpentier (Guerrilla Games) and Kohei Ishiyama (Kojima Productions) held a talk titled Decima Engine: Advances in Lighting and AA. During this presentation the two discussed rendering techniques used by the Decima Engine in games such as Horizon: Zero Dawn and Death Stranding. The official website writes:

The Decima engine was originally developed for the Killzone series, and is now powering Horizon: Zero Dawn as well as Death Stranding (Kojima Productions). In this talk we’ll cover some of the rendering techniques we developed for these titles. Topics include an improved method for approximating spherical area lights by bending the light vector of a single point light, practical realistic atmospheric scattering with height fog, our 2-frame temporal anti-aliasing solution for 1080p, and finally our optimized 2160p checkerboard rendering and ‘tangram’ resolve strategy used on the PS4 Pro.

Presenters:
Giliam de Carpentier (Guerrilla Games)
Kohei Ishiyama (Kojima Productions)

Giliam de Carpentier is a Principal Tech Engineer at Guerrilla Games in Amsterdam. He developed a number of the lighting and post processing techniques for Horizon: Zero Dawn, including its AA, HDR, reworked PBR, and checkerboard rendering. Before joining Guerrilla in 2015, he worked for 8 years at Force Field, developing graphics, AI, physics and back-end systems for many of their multi-platform games.

Kohei Ishiyama is a graphics programmer at Kojima Productions, with 6 years of previous experience as a VFX and physics programmer. On Death Stranding his main focus is on rendering programming, including the areas of physically based rendering as well as lighting. He has a strong passion for physics, and is particularly interested in ways in which the radiative transfer equation can be approximated for use in games.

Below you can find a video demonstrating some of the techniques.

This is a sample scene from the Decima Engine.
We can see an aerial perspective from sunny to cloudy weather with the inclusion of an artistic atmosphere.

So, with this result, we achieve both a realistic aerial perspective and an artistic height fog with a single height fog model.

Those interested in delving deeper into this stuff can download the full presentation slides via the official Siggraph website.

Source: Siggraph Official Website, Kojima Productions Twitter

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