Mohammed Ikram from Naughty Dog will talk about visual effects in ‘Uncharted 3’. The studio worked on rendering multiple environmental effects, such as fire, water, and sand in the game set pieces. Their challenge centred on delivering high-quality effects in real time while maintaining the cinematographic and artistic style of the game.

‘Elemental’ is a real-time demonstration developed at Epic Games to show the systems in the Unreal Engine 4. Their presenter Paul Oliver will show its rendering capabilities using DirectX 11 hardware. The per-pixel deferred shading includes energy-conserving specular highlights from area lights and shadowed reflections, dynamic global illumination that affects opaque and translucent materials, and advances in glossy surfaces. All lighting works with GPU-accelerated particle simulation and a new post-processing pipeline.

According to Lutz Latta and Roger Cordes at LucasArts, ‘Star Wars 1313’ applies traditional film techniques to real-time. Full-body performance-capture digitizes an actor’s appearance, realising the complete body and facial details. Physically-based materials and lighting are calibrated to match the real world with indirect illumination and soft shadows. Visual effects model light behaviour to create realistic fire, smoke and particles within the Coruscant underworld. The cinematic feeling is enhanced by simulating real-world camera set-ups in post.

Also part of the Computer Animation Festival, the Production Sessions are presented as an extensive series of panel discussions that focus on the visual effects and animation used in specific projects. One of these including Animation Supervisor Patrick Osborne and Lighting & Compositing Supervisor Amol Sathe, among others, is on Walt Disney Animation Studios’ short film ‘Paperman’, which merges computer-generated and hand-drawn animation techniques in black-and-white.

Another panel will discuss LAIKA's ‘ParaNorman’ and the way their team has employed stop-motion and manually created movement integrated within a computer-generated environment, from initial concept to the final frame. Panelists will be VFX supervisor Brian Van't Hul, compositing supervisor Steve Emerson and CG and look development supervisor Andrew Nawrot.

Dominic Matthews at Ninja Theory will lead a session entitled ‘Breathing Life Into Video Games’ about ‘DmC: Devil May Cry’. The company’s new entry in the Devil May Cry series of videogames is the story Dante’s early years, keeping the style of action, fluid combat and bold, cool lead character that define the series for its fans, but adding a brutality and violence. The artists will talk about how the team developed the game.