![]() ![]() To solve this, we created a GPU rendering pipeline. For static objects, this works surprisingly well with a few tricks, but for dynamic objects, there’s no getting around the fact that you have to update hundreds of instances when changing the main instance. Put simply, we had to duplicate the entire world in a grid until it reached the maximum view distance. SIGGRAPH: Can you discuss more about your GPU-driven approach for efficient instancing used to create the seemingly infinite world in “Manifold Garden”?ĪB: The world wrapping was a challenging system. I worked on the project for about two years, and “Manifold Garden” was in overall development for seven years. We had two people mainly focused on the graphics tech, and William Chyr on design, but that didn’t mean we were the only ones to touch the shader code. How many people were involved? How long did the project take?ĪB: The “Manifold Garden” team was rather small, which is often the case for indie games. ![]() That was about 9 years ago, and now here we are… I remember being just baffled that this was possible on my machine at all and had to know how all of it worked. Somewhere around the time of Unity 4, he posted an example showing off the new-at-the-time DirectX 11 features in Unity by rendering a million floating dots. If I had to point to a single origin of becoming interested in graphics, I can probably attribute this to a forum post by Aras Pranckevičius, a Unity developer. SIGGRAPH: Is there one game in particular that inspired you to pursue your career path in the industry? If yes, talk a bit about how it led you to where you are today.ĪB: I honestly don’t believe I’ve ever considered that! Though I (used to) play a lot of games, I don’t think any of my games of choice leaned particularly hard on their graphics technology. We can now likely render post-processed, anti-aliased outlines like no one else because no one else has had the need to go this far! My intuition was right about unique challenges: The world wrapping interacts with a lot of different systems and creates cool problems, and our work on the edge detection shader is another example of this. ![]() When I saw “Manifold Garden” had an opening for a graphics programmer, I went for it. This is, of course, not to say that games striving for photorealism have it easy, but when you leave that behind, you end up with challenges that are off the beaten path and often have no references to aid in troubleshooting. What I learned working on Ori is that games with peculiar graphic styles also end up with peculiar, and interesting, graphics problems. I had previously worked on “ Ori and the Blind Forest“, a 2.5D platformer with ghibli-esque graphics. The graphical style of it really struck me - it’s so focused, yet recognizable and clean. SIGGRAPH: As a veteran of the graphics world, what was unique and exciting about working on “Manifold Garden”?ĪB: I’d known about the “Manifold Garden” game a few years before I joined the team. In the end, I definitely found myself splicing together a few takes. Without any feedback, it felt very odd to keep going, especially after stumbling over something. Translating this abstract into a video turned out to be a bit of a challenge, as it was surprisingly difficult to talk without an audience while recording from my room. I started by writing a two-page abstract as a condensed version of the Talk’s content. I was also originally worried I would not fill the time with just the systems I picked, but it turns out there’s always more details to discuss than you’d initially think. Some of these systems are novel - like our edge detection or the world wrapping - others just felt nice to highlight in the context of how the look of “Manifold Garden” was created. ![]() My goal was to turn those pieces into a few “chapters” with which I would build the Talk. Instead of focusing on each and every one, I tried to identify a few of the bigger “systems” that were relatively self-contained and had some interesting tidbits to explore. Games are made up of thousands of little decisions that individually may not be of interest. SIGGRAPH: Talk a bit about the process for developing your virtual Talk.Īrthur Brussee (AB): I wasn’t quite sure where to begin with the Talk. In August, Arthur Brussee gave a Talk to SIGGRAPH 2020 participants exploring his graphics development work on the popular indie video game “ Manifold Garden.” We caught up with Arthur to learn more about his process for developing the virtual Talk, “ That’s a Wrap: A Manifold Garden Rendering Retrospective,” and to dig deeper on his team’s work creating a GPU rendering pipeline, the challenges of building a pipeline from scratch, and more. ![]()
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