Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/714180
EVEREST VR www.postmagazine.com 36 POST AUGUST 2016 in Houdini, and realtime fl uid simulations using GameWorks." As all artists know, getting detail from the white snow is not an easy task. With such a stark, white environment through- out this application, lighting became especially di cult. "Snow is super hard; it's a massive challenge from a visual standpoint," says Hardarson. "It's not just the subsurface scattering, but the way it refl ects light into all directions from within the subsurface that makes it quite tricky. It is very easy to get wrong." The RVX crew already overcame this obstacle for the movie, and now the artists had to solve it again within the real- time environment through shaders and lighting. "Our familiarity was a big help, and we were able to iterate with confi - dence that we were going in the right direction until we had a representation of what we were after." Of course, that familiarity resulted from the fi lm as well as real-world reference outside their o ce windows in Iceland. In addition to the snow, the artists used realtime cloth simulation, with wind beating against the climbers' suits. The cloth sim was generated using Nvidia's PhysX, part of its GameWorks toolset. To optimize the VR development, the group also used Nvidia's VRWorks, a suite of APIs, sample code, and libraries for virtu- al-reality development. Additionally, the crew used Simul Software's TrueSky realtime cloud simula- tion, and provided volumetric clouds and atmospherics. The development work at Solfar, which is still in progress, is being done on high- end PCs with Nvidia 980TI cards. The stu- dios' platform machines contain i5 proces- sors with Nvidia 970GX cards. "You need lots of power to run this at 90 frames per second," says Hardarson. "But, it's hard to maintain that 90 frames throughout." DRIVEN TO NEW HEIGHTS The VR experience comprises 108 billion pixels and 13 million polygons — the equivalent of 14,000 shots taken with an iPhone 6 camera. Creating such a realistic, realtime experience resulted in a number of production challenges. According to Hardarson, one of the big- gest technical challenges was cramming the experience onto an Nvidia 970GX card with 4GB of video memory. "A big part of the last two to three months has been getting this to run on consumer-level machines at 90fps all the time," Hardarson says, noting they are re- ducing the memory footprint through the use of Graphine's Granite texture-stream- ing middleware. "VR is so new, and there are so few people pushing the extreme limits like we are, that there's not a lot of people who we can ask for advice. It's great to have companies like Nvidia and Epic to turn to, to help us squeeze the most graphic qual- ity from the imagery," he continues. "After all, we are all in this together, to create the most compelling experiences for VR." In all, the group re-created roughly a seven-square-kilometer area for the high-resolution "experience," and approxi- mately 50 kilometers of the low-resolution area in the distance. As of press time, the team was in the fi nal stages of production, with a target completion date of this summer. Everest VR will be released initially for the HTC Vive and will be available through Valve's Steam. In the fall, it will be available in various app stores and will be supported on the Oculus Rift. While Everest VR has been an education experience for both studios, each plans to apply the lessons learned on the virtual mountain to another high-end VR project. "We plan to take a similar voyage and route again, which is what happens when you push the envelope," says Hardarson. "It's good to push boundaries, especially in this new medium. If it were easy, we'd probably be doing something else." Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor for Computer Graphics World. Users will encounter varied weather conditions and changes in time of day.