Data Farm

[werner.poetzelberger]

Hello Unigine People,

 

here another project done with your lovely Engine.

 

Please follow the links to some press feedback and images.

 

 

http://www.johngerrard.net/farm.html

 

 

http://www.thomasdanegallery.com/exhibitions/98/works/

 

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_uk/blog/artist-and-helicopter-capture-off-limits-data-farm

 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/feb/04/google-data-farm-john-gerrard-internet-art

 

 

All the best.

 

Werner

[ivan.cuevas]

At very begining I though it was the real pictures. Cool! :D 

Do you have more screenshots? Have you made some composition with the real and the virtual farm?

A fascinating project. Keep going.

[werner.poetzelberger]

Hello,

 

for an upcoming show of artist John Gerrard, we have updated this artwork, using the latest Engine Version.

Due to the new sky system and as well the PBR materials, we got a more realistc feel.#

We could recreate the grass around the architecture, using a standard material and some small shader tweaks, which improved performance but as well handling.

The intention also was to get a much a more painterly style, rather a pure (photo) realistic one, to create a certain mood, which talks to the artists concept and creates the visual language of the work.

 

Description of the work and installation shots (former) http://www.johngerrard.net/farm.html

 

Werner.

[binstream]

Very cool!

Could you please share some more technical details? What exactly was customized?

[werner.poetzelberger]

One major visual issue we had to come around was the fact, that Multi-sampling is not available, but TAA.

TAA creates a steady image but with the cost of loosing crispness and blurring a lot of the fine details.

 

We use a custom method which renders the whole image in a higher resolution, than the actual final, visual output. 

So the denseness of the pixels is higher, small detail's visibility is retained and flickering is reduced.

Still the cost of the high pixel amount had to be compensated, so a lot of optimization work was necessary.

 

For optimizing data and materials, we use tools, which allow us to compress textures in the desired formats and use it in customized shaders for e.g. the Nightlight situation.

 

The sky textures allows a very simple editing of sky and environment appearance, to create appealing light situations.

 

The base of the quality of the visualization was achieved by using a lot and high-res meshes and texture material, all created from photo resources and edited by hand.

[helmut.bressler]

Hello binstream,

 

thank you very much.

 

 

Could you please share some more technical details? What exactly was customized?

Not that much anymore. PBR works very well, there is no need for us to develop our custom materials.

As Werner mentioned, we have implemented support for supersampling into our executable (which is mostly based on the AppBorder plugin source code) in order to compensate the loss of sharpness introduced by TAA.

 

The only thing which has caused us some headache is that alpha blending for objects which are receiving shadows does not work anymore if you have several semi transparent objects behind each other.

In such a case, only a single lighting pass can be used, but Unigine tends to use a pass for each light source plus a pass for ambient light.

In previous Unigine versions the workaround was to copy the ambient shader into the world light shader and to disable the ambient pass. (well, it works only for a single light source, but that is typically the case in our setups)

With Unigine 2.2 this does not work any more, because the world light pass always uses additive blending, no matter what I select in the material editor.

For me it looks like that this is intentional, it is a reasonable strategy in a PBR engine (a light pass adds light to the scene), but it works only for single layer of semi transparent objects.

 

Anyway, we switched to a material with alpha test instead. Once again supersampling is quite usefull here, as it smoothes out a little bit the sharp edges of alpha tested materials.

 

Thank you and cheers

 Helmut

[taylormorris]

Wow guys, great technical work and very interesting concept! Congrats!

[werner.poetzelberger]

Thank you!