At GDC 2018 in San Francisco, Quantic Dream Lead Engine Programmer hosted a panel titled Clustered Forward Rendering and Anti-Aliasing in Detroit: Become Human, which DualShockers attended. A second panel by Gullarme Caurant and Thibault Lambert focused on the lighting tech used for the game.
First of all, we get to see some rather awesome artwork created for the environments in the game.
We hear that Quantic Dream created new tech for the game. The Detroit 3D engine supports clustered forward rendering, temporal anti-aliasing, physically-based rendering, character rendering, and effects.
Below we get to see two screenshots of scenes rendered in clusters thanks to the clustered forward rendering tech. The first includes 124 lights and 32 image-based lights.
The screenshot below showcases the use of the tech for hair and mirrors.
The game uses temporal anti-aliasing, but developers had to work on the tech to fix artifacts. Below you can see two scenes before and after the tweaks done to remove vibrations and leaking (especially on motion blur).
Temporal anti-aliasing isn’t enough in some cases, so the developers added Normal Distribution Function filtering, which works well with TAA and helps make rain details more visible.
Below you can see a comparison with TAA off and on an environment model and on Markus’ face.
The same screenshot with Markus’ face shows Temporal Screen Space Sub Surface Scattering off and on.
Moving on to ambient occlusion, the screenshots below show SSAO off and on.
Temporal Screen Space Reflections were also used, and below you can see them off and on, alongside a look at Temporal Volumetric Lighting.
Last, but not least, we also get some data on how the game will perform on standard PS4 and PS4 Pro.
The standard console will get 1080p and 30 FPS. This isn’t an action game, so the developers focused on graphics without pushing for 60 FPS. They also avoided loading screens whenever possible. Volumetric lighting is rendered on 192x1080x64, and HDR is supported.
On PS4 Pro the game will render at 2160p (4K) checkerboard, and will again run at 30 FPS. The UI will be rendered in full 4K, and volumetric lighting will be in 235x135x64. Even here, HDR will of course be supported.
Moving on to the second panel we get to see the developer’s “Icing Tool” used to calibrate lighting and materials.
Quantic Dream used special close-up lights to replace regular lighting you can see the difference between the regular lights and the close-up ones below. The second pair of screenshot shows a similar concept applied to shadows.
The screenshots below show a comparison without and with volumetric lighting, followed by a second shot of the effect.
If you want to see more, you can check out a recent trailer, another trio showcasing the three protagonists, and fifteen minutes of gameplay.
Detroit: Become Human will release exclusively for PS4 on May 25th.