This month's Graphics & Rendering activity includes 2 granted patents from Activision Blizzard (1) and Tencent (1).
Tencent's patent describes a real-time volumetric fog of war system for strategy games that replaces traditional 2D opacity overlays with dynamic 3D fog capable of physically interacting with units and terrain. Activision Blizzard's patent covers an LED wall surface reflectance system that employs large LED displays to capture precise lighting data from skin and materials, enabling hyper-realistic character rendering in video games.
Tencent received 1 patent addressing the visual presentation of unexplored territory in strategy games. The system constructs a true volumetric density field from the game's 3D mesh rather than simply overlaying flat opacity masks on the minimap or viewport. Moving units carve out space in the fog using signed distance field calculations, creating the appearance of physical displacement as characters push through the mist. The fog itself renders at a lower resolution with layered 3D noise and flow-map animation, then uses temporal reconstruction to maintain visual fidelity while keeping GPU costs manageable.
Activision Blizzard received 1 patent for a lighting capture method that repurposes massive LED walls as precision light source arrays. Each pixel on the LED display functions as an individually controllable light emitter that maps directly to a pixel in the game engine, allowing the system to sample how skin and materials respond to virtually any lighting condition without requiring a separate light stage. The approach consolidates what previously demanded multiple exposures and dedicated equipment into a single LED wall that provides both the background plate and the lighting characterization data in real time.
All data sourced from USPTO patent filings. Google Patents may take several weeks to index recent publications. If a link is unavailable, search for the patent number at USPTO Patent Public Search.