Jan Beneš Remedy, Audio Programmer

Thomas Puha Umbra, Man of all hours

Using Umbra Spatial Data forVisibility and Audio Propagation

in Quantum Break

NEW STUFFUmbra Cloud and the Umbra DebuggerImproved usability and accessibility

UMBRA VIDEODebugger, what is occlusion culling, Umbra Cloud

Debugger

Video of what Umbra does

Explain what occlusion culling, Umbra

debugger and Umbra Cloud during video

EXAMPLESUmbra data is useful for many things

JAN BENEŠRemedy & Quantum Break

REMEDY HISTORY1996 Death Rally

1997 Final Reality

(Futuremark)

2001 Max Payne 1

2003 Max Payne 2

2008 Max Payne Movie

2010 Alan Wake

2011 Death Rally Mobile

2012 Alan Wake’s American

Nightmare

2014 Agents of Storm

2015 Quantum Break

NORTHLIGHT• In-house• Based on AW tech • Open world• Streaming – 2D grid of ’cells’• Relies on key middleware• Xbox One, C++ & D • Renderer• DX11, multithreaded, deferred

lighting

QUANTUM BREAK REQUIREMENTS

• Varying environments(indoors, urban environment, outdoors…)

• Tens of thousands meshes per level

• Dynamic elements• Level permutations• Fast & automatic

incremental builds• Xbox One

UMBRA IN QUANTUM BREAK

• Occlusion culling• Main camera• Directional lights (shadow culling)

• Audio• Environments & reverb• Audio occlusion • Audio propagation

WHY UMBRA?• Long history with Umbra• Good experience using ’previous-gen’

Umbra in AW• New features• Scene hierarchy/voxelization• Raycasts• Bi-dir visibility

• Supports streaming (TomeCollection in Umbra 3)

OCCLUSION CULLING• Main camera and directional light

shadows• Asynchronous queries• Bi-directional visibility• Collaborated on a new culling

feature with Umbra• Store local depth cube maps for each

object• ~ 10% increase in the number of

occluded objects

STATISTICS (GAMESCOM DEMO LEVEL)

• Clean export times (Core-i7, 8 HW threads)• ~ 14 min (3 different permutations)

• Iteration times < 1 min • Runtime stats• Data size: around 20 MB • Camera visibility queries 1-2 ms (on a

worker thread)

QUANTUM BREAK AUDIO TECH

• Two different soundscapes• Wwise, RTPCs• Runtime effects (lot of convolution

reverb)• Custom Wwise plugins (university

collab)• Grain Synth• Geometric distortion in frozen scenes (signal

analysis plugin)

• Sound occlusion & propagation

SOUND ENVIRONMENTS

• Sphere or box areas with effects (reverb), switching weapon assets

• Quick way to query for local environments in game (clusters)

• Smooth transitions, overlaps & blending• Raycasts to prevent the effects from bleeding through

walls

[VIDEO]Sound enviroments

SOUND OBSTRUCTION – RAYCASTS

• Raycasts between sound sources & camera• Umbra raycasts are fast (operating on voxelized

geometry)• Multiple (3x3) raycasts to distinguish

occlusion/obstruction

SOUND OBSTRUCTION – STATISTICS• ~ 2 ms budget for all 3D audio

computations• Only single raycasts for distant objects• Usual raycast count (after): 100-200 per

frame• Updating only a part of the active objects

every frame

UMBRA GATES• Objects with controlled occlusion behavior

(on/off)

• Specific usecase - audio occluders• Marking windows and glass walls that should obstruct

only audio

• Generic dynamic gates• Same system & data used for camera culling & audio

obstruction• Opening doors also opens an Umbra gate

SOUND PROPAGATION

• Propagating obstructed sound through doors and portals (gates!)

• Affects positioning (sound coming from the door)

• Effects – more reverb, filtering, lower volume

• Setup in editor – gate with environments on each side

SOUND PROPAGATION – RUNTIME

• Find environments of the sound and camera (query cluster)• Environments know the gates

connecting them (cached as a graph)

• Gates determine virtual positions of the sounds• Keep distance to preserve

attenuation

Camera

Source Virtual source

Gate

[VIDEO]Sound Occlusion & Propagation

THANKS FOR LISTENING!

QUESTIONS?Umbra3d.com

Remedygames.comTwitter: @umbra3d / @remedygames

Umbra booth at Expo hall #824