Using Raymarched shaders as environments in 3D video games

Abstract

Today’s 3D video games boast of massive game worlds. Responsible for this are a huge group of 3D artists who bring the world to life through their content creation skills. But what if the entire world could be created and rendered with the help of a single shader. The video game industry has almost solely relied on poly modeling as its main source of content creation. But technical and usability issues with the use of polygons exist to this very day, such as the need for a high polygon counts to depict detail, tedious setup of the environment, the use of multiple levels of detail for individual assets, repeated asset instantiation to depict endless environments, and lack of flexibility in changing entire environments due to memory and storage overhead. In order to overcome these issues, alternate means of content creation need to be considered and evaluated. The idea of creating endless video game terrains and assets without the use of the traditional asset generation pipeline and repetition of art assets is a fascinating and favorable one for video game artists, and has found limited application through procedural generation of geometry (polygons). This research aims at achieving the above in a game engine with just the use of shader code. Shaders have long been used to tweak surface and material properties of poly surfaces in the video game industry, but have seldom been looked at as a means of asset creation just by themselves. Raymarching is the technique that makes the rendering of environments solely with the use of a shader possible. It has existed for decades but has only recently found popularity in real-time applications due to the expansion of hardware shaders. Our research is aimed at defining a content creation pipeline which supports rendering game environments in game engines solely with the help of shaders, and evaluating its potential use for interactive game environments. To facilitate this, we will compare the shader generated environments with a similar poly-modeled environment using the key factors of content generation as a framework to analyze them in a qualitative and quantitative manner.M.S., Digital Media -- Drexel University, 202