Creating EA SPORTS™ College Football 25 was an enormous project that required new development solutions to accurately replicate iconic pageantry and stadiums for 134 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams.
One area of innovation was the use of hardware ray tracing for indirect lighting with Global Illumination Based on Surfels (GIBS) technology.
GIBS is a comprehensive solution for indirect light that frees artists from tedious and time-consuming processes (like using 2D light maps or 3D probe grids to store indirect light).
Every surface in the stadium is dynamically lit by light that naturally bounces off multiple surfaces. The result is a rendered scene that looks realistic with lifelike and immersive visual details.
Learn more about GIBS, find out why it was used for EA SPORTS College Football 25, and see how it lights up the authentic gameday atmosphere.
GIBS is designed to calculate indirect diffuse illumination in real time.
Development on GIBS technology started back in 2018 as part of the DirectX Raytracing announcement and collaboration between SEED, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. The PICA PICA demo, shown at GDC 2018, was the result of this joint effort.
The work transitioned into productization via a partnership with Frostbite and was shown at SIGGRAPH 2021 branded as GIBS. Engineers on the SEED and Frostbite teams first prototyped a real-time solution for global illumination that would leverage the capabilities of new ray-tracing hardware.
This initial work was further developed and ultimately integrated by the College Football team in EA SPORTS College Football 25.
Most indirect lighting solutions use either 2D light maps or 3D probe grids to store indirect light. These techniques usually require extensive artist setup and time-consuming light baking. In contrast, GIBS is a fully dynamic solution that allows artists to iterate quickly and light environments in real time.
This dynamic global illumination system is based on surfels, which is an abbreviated term for surface elements. Surfels are disk-shaped primitives that spawn on geometric shapes within a scene.
Surfels approximate a surface when combined and cache indirect lighting information. Merging hardware ray tracing with surfels spawning across geometric surfaces on-the-fly allows the scene to accumulate and cache irradiance.
“Ray-tracing operations are performed exactly where they’re needed, on the surfaces in the scene, which is a good fit for global illumination.” – Henrik Halén (Principal Software Engineer, SEED)
These elements help remove limitations on how geometry can be moved around, created, and destroyed. Eliminating the need to set up traditional lighting techniques like special meshes or UV sets gave developers the ability to recreate college football stadiums more efficiently.
GIBS opens up new possibilities with ray-traced lighting for stadiums, enabling high-fidelity illumination in dynamic environments and enabling development teams to work quickly and efficiently.
“Simply put, GIBS is runtime ray-traced lighting for stadiums. This means our artists don’t have to bake lighting into the stadium.” – Richard Burgess-Dawson (Sr. Art Director, College Football)
GIBS was designed to be a real-time global illumination system that creates dynamic lighting calculations. The College Football team initially didn’t expect to use GIBS since lighting doesn’t change much over the course of a single game.
However, turning on GIBS meant lighters and environment artists could work in tandem. While surfels are used to light the environments, the College Football team helped expand the use of ray-traced GPU probes for characters. This was a key advancement for more realistic results and improved performance across the entire scene.
“Through the exceptionally close collaboration between our rendering engineers and the Frostbite and SEED teams, we advanced GIBS performance to achieve our target of 60 frames per second across target platforms such as PS5, XBSX, and XBSS.” – Ishaan Singh (Technical Director - Rendering, College Football)
The College Football team further customized GIBS by developing tools to optimize the game’s complex stadium geometry for efficient ray tracing. They devised a preload system that transitions GIBS through different states during load time, ensuring the first frames seen by a user have well-converged lighting.
With GIBS in place, the team also utilized a Stadium Toolkit, giving designers and developers the ability to build stadiums at scale and hone in on specific details for each stadium. These innovations working in tandem were vital for the return of EA SPORTS College Football.
This workflow helped the team meet an ambitious goal of building 150+ stadiums within a single production cycle, while also maintaining high quality and attention to detail.
“GIBS decouples dependencies, giving our groups the opportunity to work almost independently. Lighters just light and environment artists just build structures.” – Jay Goodman, (Technical Art Director, College Football)
Whether it’s tunnel lights setting the mood as players run out onto the field or soft lighting at sunset, GIBS played a supportive role in lighting up the immersive atmosphere within EA SPORTS College Football 25.
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