The Rendering of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2

[latexpage] Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 was released in 2014, a sequel that builds on top of Lords of Shadow, its first installment, which uses a similar engine. I hold these games dear and, being Spanish myself, I’m very proud of the work MercurySteam, a team from Madrid, did on all three modern reinterpretations of the Castlevania series (Lords of Shadow, Mirror of Fate and Lords of Shadow 2). Out of curiosity and pure fandom for the game I decided to peek into the Mercury Engine. Despite the first Lords of Shadow being, without shadow of a doubt (no pun intended), the best and most enjoyable of the new Castlevanias, out of justice for their hard work I decided to analyze a frame from their latest and most polished version of the engine. Despite being a recent game, it uses DX9 as graphics backend. Many popular tools like RenderDoc or the newest tools by Nvidia and AMD don’t support DX9, so I used Intel Graphics Analyzer to capture and analyze all the images and code from this post. While having a bit of graphics parlance, I’ve tried to include as many images as possible, with occasional code and in-depth explanations.

Analyzing a Frame

This is the frame we’re going to be looking at. It’s the beginning scene of Lords of Shadow 2, Dracula has just awakened, enemies are knocking at his door and he is not in the best mood.

CLOS2 Castle Final Frame

Depth Pre-pass

LoS2 appears to do what is called a depth pre-pass. What it means is you send the geometry once through the pipeline with very simple shaders, and pre-emptively populate the depth buffer. This is useful for the next pass (Gbuffer), as it attempts to avoid overdraw, so pixels with a depth value higher than the one already in the buffer (essentially, pixels that are behind) get discarded before they run the pixel shader, therefore minimizing pixel shader runs at the cost of extra geometry processing. Alpha tested geometry, like hair and a rug with holes, are also included in the pre-pass. LoS2 uses both the standard depth buffer and a depth-as-color buffer to be able to sample the depth buffer as a texture in a later stage.

The game also takes the opportunity to fill in the stencil buffer, an auxiliary buffer that is part of the depth buffer, and generally contains masks for pixel selection. I haven’t thoroughly investigated why precisely all these elements are marked, but for instance was presents higher subsurface scattering and hair and skin have its own shading, independent of the main lighting pass, which stencil allows to ignore.

  • Dracula: 85
  • Hair, skin and leather: 86
  • Window glass/blood/dripping wax: 133
  • Candles: 21

The first image below shows what the overdraw is like for this scene. A depth pre-pass helps if you have a lot of overdraw. The second image is the stencil buffer.

Depth Prepass Overdraw
Stencil
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GBuffer Pass

LoS2 uses a deferred pipeline, fully populating 4 G-Buffers. 4 buffers is quite big for a game that was released on Xbox360 and PS3, other games get away with 3 by using several optimizations.

Normals (in World Space):

R8 G8 B8 A8
Normal.r Normal.g Normal.b SSS

The normal buffer is populated with the three components of the world space normal and a subsurface scattering term for hair and wax (interestingly not skin). Opaque objects only transform their normal from tangent space to world space, but hair uses some form of normal shifting to give it anisotropic properties.

Normals RGB (World)
Normal SSS
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Albedo:

R8 G8 B8 A8
Albedo.r Albedo.g Albedo.b Alpha * AOLevels

The albedo buffer stores all three albedo components plus an ambient occlusion term that is stored per vertex in the alpha channel of the vertex color and is modulated by an AO constant (which I presume depends on the general lighting of the scene).

Albedo RGB
Albedo AO
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Specular:

R8 G8 B8 A8
Specular.r Specular.g Specular.b Fresnel Multiplier

dp3_pp r0.w, r2, r3 //float NdotV = dot(worldViewVector, normalizedWorldNormal);The specular buffer stores the specular color multiplied by a fresnel term that depends on the view and normal vectors. Although LoS2 does not use physically-based rendering, it includes a Fresnel term probably inspired in part by the Schlick approximation to try and brighten things up at glancing angles. It is not strictly correct, as it is done independently of the real-time lights. The Fresnel factor is also stored in the w component.

Specular RGB
Specular Fresnel Multiplier
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