Video: Making games look like movies, circa GDC 2004

"With the current programmable graphics hardware and floating point pipeline, we could leverage a lot of shading and rendering techniques from the cinematic world for use in our games."

In this free GDC Vault video from GDC 2004, Arcot Preetham from ATI (quoted above) and Hector Yee and David Hart from PDI/Dreamworks discuss how movie shaders -- like those used in the Shrek series -- and real-time shaders in games like Jak 2 differ, and which shader techniques are transferrable from movies to games, in the talk "Procedural Shaders: A Feature Animation Perspective."

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