Over the last 2 decades, Pierre Yves has collaborated with Engineering, Art, Product and Design teams to develop real-time technologies. He has managed teams of engineers, artists and technical artists focused on computer graphics, tools development, workflows, education, and marketing.
He has contributed to large AAA game productions, such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Grand Theft Auto V, and the Crysis trilogy. He has led projects to develop, design, and showcase rendering technologies with accessible workflows for multiple game engines, such as Unity and CryEngine. Therefore, he has proven experience in 3D engine development, tools design, and 3D art production.
Pierre Yves strives for efficiency, is a great communicator and a fast learner. He always looks forward to creating engaging experiences with the most innovative technologies and workflows.
Pierre Yves Donzallaz spearheaded the production of the URP 3D Sample, a project featuring 4 vignette environments with different art styles, rendering paths, and scene complexity, to represent the great variety of 3D projects built with the Universal Render Pipeline (URP). This sample targets a wide range of platforms, from mobile devices, to consoles and PCs, as well as VR headsets.
Pierre Yves advocated for the project internally among leadership, budgeted and scheduled the sprints and milestones, managed artist resources, communicated with the outsourcing studios, and created the in-editor tutorial and all marketing materials. To learn more about the project, head to the official landing page.
In this half-hour video tutorial produced for Unite 2022, Unity’s yearly developers conference, Pierre Yves Donzallaz presented all the techniques required to light the famous Sponza Atrium.
He showcases rasterized techniques with lightmaps, light probes and reflection probes, as well as the latest ray tracing methods for Global Illumination, Reflections and Ambient Occlusion, including the latest developments in path tracing and Adaptive Probe Volumes.
In his talk “How to Light an Environment with Unity” at the ReConnect 2022 conference in Utrecht, Netherlands, Pierre Yves Donzallaz demonstrated how to render an environment from scratch with Unity.
He covered various lighting features and systems, such as the GPU Lightmapper, the new Probe Volume system, Scene Space effects (SSAO, SSGI, SSR), Ray Tracing effects and even Path Tracing.
Pierre Yves Donzallaz collaborated on the creation of an e-book about the lighting and rendering in Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline. It is a comprehensive guide to help technical artists and developers to further explore the high-end, physically based lighting techniques in HDRP for both PC and console.
In particular, we cover anti-aliasing methods, physically-based lighting & cameras, environment effects (e.g. sky, fog, and clouds), shadows, reflections, as well as post-processing and ray tracing.
Pierre Yves Donzallaz collaborated with a graphics engineer to design a performant and user-friendly solution for volumetric clouds in Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
For the promotion of this new system, he solely created all the corresponding marketing material, such as this trailer and various beauty shots.
Pierre Yves published an article on the official Unity website describing the technology behind this new rendering feature, its ease of use as well as its known limitations and future improvements.
In this half-hour session produced for SIGGRAPH 2021, Pierre Yves Donzallaz presented some of the most exciting rendering features introduced in Unity 2021.2, for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) and Universal Render Pipeline (URP).
He first teaches users about sky rendering in Unity, from HDRI sky with distortion support to animated Cloud Layers (up to 8 texture-driven layers). Pierre Yves then showcases the brand-new ray marched Volumetric Clouds for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
In the second half, he presents the new Lens Flares helping creators to simulate camera lens effects in a couple of clicks, and the new Light Anchor system which dramatically speeds up the production of cutscene and product lighting, thanks to handy controls and presets.
In this NVIDIA-sponsored webinar, Pierre Yves Donzallaz demonstrated how to use the ray tracing effects provided by Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). He showcases in detail ray-traced ambient occlusion, reflections, global illumination, shadows, and path tracing.
Pierre Yves also explains how to use the various debug views to isolate these effects and offer recommendations to ensure a suitable frame rate for a wide variety of use cases, from games to high-end visualizations.
Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion (RTAO)
The screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) has been a staple of real-time rendering for games for more than a decade. It is used to simulate the environment’s diffuse occlusion, in order to improve visual contact between objects in the world and darken the lighting in concave areas. However, this effect, when pushed too far, can produce halos around geometries, and even a cartoony look. On top of it, one of the main drawbacks of this screen-space technique is its inability to generate occlusion from objects which reside outside the frame, as it only relies on the depth information available in the Z-buffer. On the plus side, this effect is still great at handling micro-occlusion of small areas in the camera’s perspective, for a relatively low-performance cost.
Hopefully, thanks to Ray Tracing, rays can be shot at surfaces beyond the camera frustum, and therefore they are able to reach objects located outside the frame. This way, you can get great macro-occlusion from large objects located all around the camera. Although technically AO is only a rough approximation of environment lighting, it can complement other lighting techniques such as lightmaps or light probes, whose resolution or density is limited and therefore unable to capture micro-occlusion.
Ray Traced Reflections (RTR)
In a similar fashion to SSAO, screen-space reflections (SSR) can only reflect objects located in the frame: again, surfaces that aren’t immediately visible to the camera cannot be reflected. For instance, looking at the floor will result in the SSR technique being unable to provide any useful information. Therefore, SSR is very approximative, and this technique tends to have many detractors, including yours truly, as a good placement of static Reflection Probes can often provide more appealing and less distracting results for most static scenarios. However, one area where SSR shines literally is when dealing with planar reflections for surfaces parallel to the view direction, such as floors, walls, and ceilings. An optimal use-case for SSR would be a camera whose pitch is locked, such as in a racing game.
With Ray Tracing, however, we are able to get access to information that resides outside the screen, and as a consequence, we can offer a more exact reflection of the world, at least within a certain radius around the camera, defined by the Light Cluster and the length of the rays.
Ray Traced Global Illumination (RTGI)
One of the most impressive features of Ray Tracing is the ability to generate real-time global illumination, that is the simulation of indirect lighting, or simply put, the lighting bouncing in the environment.
Typically, in game engines, the indirect lighting is handled with pre-computed or baking techniques, such as light probes or lightmaps, and they can greatly slow down the iteration time of artists and designers dealing with the lighting.
Thankfully, HDRP offers 2 techniques for RTGI: a Performance and a Quality one. The former is geared towards high frame rate scenarios in direct light, whereas the second one can provide very accurate results in more complex interiors thanks to multiple bounces and samples, for a very high computational cost nonetheless.
Ray-traced Shadows
Out of the box, when using the High shadow filtering quality (PCSS), HDRP provides great looking shadow maps that simulate the natural smoothness of shadows, while ensuring they remain sharp near the shadow casters, like in real life. However, when using the cheaper Medium filtering quality, results can be underwhelming, as the entire shadow map is filtered uniformly, regardless of the distances between casters and receivers.
Results can be improved dramatically with Ray Traced shadows, by shooting rays from surfaces towards the lights to figure out the amount of occlusion between them. This can therefore provide an extremely realistic approximation of the shadowing, for a moderate performance cost. In addition, HDRP supports transparent shadows!
Pierre Yves Donzallaz was a leading force behind the new scene template for the High Definition Render Pipeline, from early requirements, to final delivery. It features most key features found in HDRP, from the volume system, to the physically based lighting and exposure. Furthermore, he solely created the following trailer.
The new template is set up in a physically based way, with a realistic sun intensity at 100,000 lux and correct exposures for each location. Beginners now have a good setup to start lighting their scenes, and they can experiment confidently with this template, knowing that the lighting is already correctly tuned.
To help users understand how the lighting is set up, Pierre Yves created a cheat sheet with important lighting values, with color temperatures and intensities of common light sources, as well as exposure values of typical scenes.
For Unite Now, Unity’s online conference, Pierre Yves Donzallaz created an hour-long video session about Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline. HDRP is tailored for high-quality visuals on high-end platforms, such as PC and consoles.
He presents several key features of HDRP, such as the volume system, the antialiasing techniques, the exposure system, the volumetric effects, and the different lighting components required to set up the lighting in Unity.
Unity’s Lights, Shadows, Reflections, and Volumetric Fog settings are covered in detail, to help Unity users maximize the visual quality in their projects. Pierre Yves ends the session by talking about some of the most important post-processing effects, such as tonemapping, white balance, and depth of field.
He also explains precisely the physically-based lighting concepts and the photography theory required to light a scene correctly with HDRP, using real-world exposures and light intensities for natural and artificial lights.
Pierre Yves Donzallaz 