The Rendering of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

If you like this, you'll like the many graphics studies of http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/ and you might appreciate https://www.reddit.com/r/videogamescience/

> The game itself was a great surprise, and the fact that it was a spin-off within the storyline of the Lord of the Rings universe was quite unusual and it’s something I enjoyed.

Hopefully it becomes less unusual. Works (whether they be literature or media) with well developed plots tend to make poor video games when they attempt to translate that plot. I suspect it's a combination of the type of movie that generally garners video game conversions (action-y) and the type of games those most often lead to (also action-y) being hard to deliver a plot like that.

A spinoff with a mostly new plot that can be tailored to what a video game can do best will generally result in a superior experience, IMO.

I’m a graphics engine developer and I almost always play AAA games with an eye towards analyzing the rendering engine. SoM might be the first game that was so much fun to play, that I never even noticed the rendering. After reading this write up I’m going to have to play it again.

> An interesting example here is Talion’s cape, which is sent to the GPU as a point cloud

Wow. Interesting. I'm assuming it's not "just" a point cloud. My experience with 3D scanning and photogrammatry seems to indicate that mesh construction of an arbitrary point cloud is not the kind of thing you would try doing in real time (try "overnight").

So unless there's some magic here then at the very least the point ordering allows a huge short cut to be taken. Or is it more than that? i.e. there's a healthy chunk of metadata about the desired topology?

Why aren't game graphics developers not the most well paid engineers? This stuff is magically awesome!

I'm interested what this deep G buffer for the order-independent transparency would entail.

I love these types of breakdowns! It would be really cool to see breakdowns in other portions of a game engine, too: physics, character animation, managing the massive assets, lots of potential goodies.

Wow. This is a lot to take in! Thank you for this, it gives me a gateway into things I can research to expand my knowledge on the subject of graphics.