Overview

In this session, Umbra's CTO will demonstrate Umbra's latest technology - a novel, automated visibility solution. Bungie's Lead Graphics Architect Hao Chen discusses how Umbra's solution enabled a new level of artistic freedom and rapid content iteration times. Umbra's solution eliminates the need for manual markups typically associated with polygon soups. It allows loose construction of game worlds instead of highly restrictive and technical process of constructing well formed, water-tight geometry. The automatically created spatial database can be used for reasoning about space, not only to perform occlusion culling but also to solve other problems such as 3D path finding, audio propagation and even lighting. This approach is vital in the creation of Bungie's next universe and its unparalleled gaming experience, which is why Umbra 3 is a key component in Destiny. Takeaway: Umbra has developed a new approach for solving visibility and performing occlusion culling. In this talk Umbra and Bungie discuss the requirements for the visibility system and content creation in Destiny, and how the key problems were solved.