Real-Time Samurai Cinema: Lighting, Atmosphere, and Tonemapping in Ghost of Tsushima

Set in 13th century Japan, Ghost of Tsushima pays homage to classic samurai cinema with dramatic lighting, wind, clouds, haze, and fog, and features a beautiful open-world version of the island of Tsushima during the first Mongol invasion. In this talk, we will cover the diffuse and specular indirect lighting techniques used in the game including methods of computing SH irradiance probes from sky visibility data, including plausible sky and sun/moon bounce light. Next, we present our atmospheric lighting and rendering techniques, including how we lit our haze, clouds, and particles with multiple scattering. We show how to improve the accuracy of Rayleigh scattering to approach that of spectral rendering by using a custom color space for atmospheric lighting calculations. Finally, we discuss some of the tone mapping techniques we used to recreate the samurai cinema experience in-game.

Bio:

Jasmin Patry is a Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch Productions, where he has worked on Infamous 2, Infamous Second Son, Infamous First Light, and Ghost of Tsushima. Prior to that, he was at Radical Entertainment and contributed to their Hulk, Scarface, and Prototype titles. As a graduate student in the Computer Graphics Lab at the University of Waterloo, he created the popular Linux game Tux Racer, which was named “Best Free Software” by PC Magazine and has downloads numbering in the millions. His interests include physically based rendering, scientific computing, and performance optimization — and anything that makes games look better and run faster.

[PetrVejchoda]

Love the last part. I mean it was all great, but the attention to detail in "night time rendering".

[robertvalentic]

I’m here using Unity’s real-time light, light probes and reflection probes thinking that’s all there is. Watching this has blown my mind

[mou.]

Will the GDC talk about procedural grass be available on youtube?