Interesting talks coming up from Epic at GDC

"This talk will focus on next generation graphics effects developed for Epic's GDC 2011 Samaritan demo. Epic engineers, in collaboration with NVIDIA, extended the engine to support Direct3D 11 and add displacement mapping.

This talk will explain the bumps encountered and overcome along the way, along with extensive details on how displacement mapping was exploited in the demo. The talk will also explain in detail the many other new graphical features highlighted in the demo: screen space surface scattering for skin rendering, deferred rendering with MSAA, short hair rendering, blurry reflections based on ray-casting an approximate scene, and high quality depth of field featuring custom bokeh."

The Technology Behind the DirectX 11 Unreal Engine Samaritan Demo (Presented by NVIDIA)

"In this session, we will show how artists can generate realistic and interactive clothing using the APEX Clothing module. Step by step, we will demonstrate the full authoring pipeline, from DCC tools to final integration into a game engine (in this case Unreal Engine 3) and present how real clothing can provide a totally new cinematic game experience.

This session introduces the full NVIDIA APEX suite of artist friendly tools and runtime libraries (Clothing, Destruction, Particles and Turbulence) which significantly speed up creation and inclusion of scalable, dynamic content without large engineering effort into any game engine."

Realistic and Interactive Clothing in Epic Games Samaritan Demo Using NVIDIA APEX (Presented by NVIDIA)