Only a few days behind schedule due to our hopeless ISP, today we bring you Part II of the Radeon 8500 Graphics Demos.  The first order of business is to give out a great big thank you to all of the mirror sites for the demos.  Gamers-Ammo unfortunately had to take the demo movies off-line because y'all were burying their server, but SoundcardCentral and Puces3D are still kickin.

While you're reading through the info we've got for you today, you can start downloading each of the movies from the Downloads page .

The first demo is the "Rachel" facial animation demo, which is terribly corny, yet the realism and animation is some of the very best we've seen in real-time yet.  The second demo is the Radeon Islands demo which brings together all of the power and features of the Radeon 8500 in one demo almost 4 minutes long.  It is every bit as impressive as the Radeon's ARK demo was when the original Radeon was released, and I hope you enjoy the video footage we have for you.  Also, be sure to check out the video from the Waterfall demo that you first saw in Part I of the Radeon 8500 demos article.

Feel free to take any questions you might have to our Radeon 7500/8500 forum which should be back up and running by the time you read this.

-Ichneumon

ATI RADEON 8500 "Rachel" Facial Animation Demo
 

        The RADEON 8500 Rachel Demo shows an example of the realism that can be achieved when applying SMARTSHADER™ technology at the vertex and pixel levels.  Vertex shaders are used to morph between animation keyframes output from the Life F/X facial animation system, while pixel shaders are used to render the most realistic skin ever drawn in real-time.  The Life F/X facial animation system has been used in past well-known (non-real-time) SIGGRAPH animations such as The Jester (1999) and Young At Heart (2000).

        In the RADEON 8500 Rachel demo, texture maps representing the base skin color, skin pores and shininess are combined and lit on the fly using a complex 1.4 pixel shader which models Fresnel effects and even takes into account the variability of the oiliness of the skin.  Even the hair and eyelashes are lit with per-pixel anisotropic lighting to simulate the lighting patterns one sees on surfaces made up of small grooves or strands (such as hairs).

Here are a variety of screenshots of this demo:

        Note specifically the specular bump maps on Rachel's lips, skin and even her teeth.  Also, note the environment mapping of her eyeballs which includes separate geometry for the cornea, significantly increasing the level of realism.  Even the jewels and satin choker have their own shaders.

More shots for you to scrutinize:

ATI RADEON 8500 Island Demo
 

        The RADEON 8500 Island Demo is the coup de grâce of the RADEON 8500 demo suite, leveraging every ounce of functionality of the chip.  The island demo takes place on three different islands of an ocean-covered alien planet.  The islands are connected via large arched portals through which the viewer flies.  The total flythrough is about four minutes.

Island 1

This island has a colorful crystalline theme, with multi-colored crystals casting light on the environment.  Look for the stencil shadows, which are used to accurately cast shadows in the scene.  Note specifically the animated creatures which cast shadows on both the environment and themselves.  All of the lighting is done per-pixel, using 1.4 Pixel Shaders to compute accurate per-pixel bump mapping and distance attenuation.

Island 2

This island has an inland lake which is populated with a big green slug creature.  As this creature animates, note that it is accurately reflected in the surface of the water and refracted through the surface of the water.  This is done using a pair of renderable textures: a reflection map and a refraction map.  When drawing the water, these two textures are used on the bump mapped water.  In all of the islands, the sky is visible.  The sky uses a combination of several Perlin noise textures and dependent texture reads to generate natural-looking roiling clouds.  Like most of the shaders used in the Island Demo, this shader is only possible with 1.4 Pixel Shaders.

Island 3

On island 3, we witness a mysterious ceremony happening on the alien world.  Bump mapped and skeletally animated bipeds morph into quadrupeds and run into the ocean.  The camera follows the action of the ceremony before zooming up the final portal.