161–170 of 235 posts
I'm not sure what's the big deal here; the demoscene has been doing realtime raytracing for many many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097
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>My experience with the game industry, even if you have a better way of doing things, if it takes more CPU/GPU cycles that a hack that achieves basically the same quality, it will not be adopted. It is that simple. That's not always the case. Physically based materials, tonemapping and many more were widely adopted in game engines because they're easier to get proper and predictable results with. It's the same with m…
In the realtime performance vs developer time tradeoff, the magnitudes are important... and also, their value . For a long time, games pushed the graphics envelope, but that doesn't seem the case any more. So perhaps that's less important today, and GPUs have overshot gamer needs. OTOH, development costs of AAA games are incredibly high. with larger worlds at higher res. Even worse at 4K. So the question of the magni…
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How is that free though? You have to fire more rays for each moving object. That's not cheap. And the only thing you get is variable accuracy collision detection.
You wouldn't have to fire out more rays if you could use the same ones that are used for calculating light bounces.
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I'm not sure it's fair to describe those as hacks. Those techniques are also used for animated movies, which take many CPU-years to render. Those "hacks" are used even when artist have huge amounts of hardware, no real-time constraints, and need extremely high quality. Techniques other than raytracing have an artistic place, not merely a pragmatic one.
Aren't animated movies pretty much universally ray traced?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_RenderMan
These days they're pretty much 100% path-traced. But most animated films out there in the history of 3d animation were rasterized.
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In the realtime performance vs developer time tradeoff, the magnitudes are important... and also, their value . For a long time, games pushed the graphics envelope, but that doesn't seem the case any more. So perhaps that's less important today, and GPUs have overshot gamer needs. OTOH, development costs of AAA games are incredibly high. with larger worlds at higher res. Even worse at 4K. So the question of the magni…
The cost of games is not the render engine, remember that most use ue4 or unity. The cost of games 90% is asset and gameplay and UI/UX development.
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Physically based rendering is _not_ the Disney shader and renaming your diffuse maps to albedo because it sounds more sciencey. It’s about the wholesale switch to a fully path-traced framework with a consistent mathematical foundation as opposed to the layered system of hacks and chained prepasses that prevailed in the early 2000’s
This. You can use PBR concepts in an old school renderman style pipeline, but that's not why it's been a big deal in VFX. With a PBRT style renderer, everything is handled in a single monte carlo framework. And once you get an unbiased renderer that meets your standards, you can implement schemes like irradiance caching or photon mapping that introduce bias, but greatly accelerate rendering (and reduce noise). That o…
Which has been said since earl6 2000. But the question is, when? Or if it will ever come?
If you look at road maps we surely dont have that in next 5 years, even unlikely in 10.
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> Not to sound too crazy but I also have a strong suspicion that if you tied a physics engine to a raytracer, you might get your physics 'for free' which could be a big deal for pushing forward more realistic physics too. Why is that?
To my knowledge, the biggest part of game physics is collision detection. (There's a lot more floats in the geometry of a rigid body than there are in its motion vectors). If you had a perfect raytracer for "free," you could fire out a fiber bundle from moving objects in the direction of their motion to find out what they'd hit.
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Physically based rendering is _not_ the Disney shader and renaming your diffuse maps to albedo because it sounds more sciencey. It’s about the wholesale switch to a fully path-traced framework with a consistent mathematical foundation as opposed to the layered system of hacks and chained prepasses that prevailed in the early 2000’s
This. You can use PBR concepts in an old school renderman style pipeline, but that's not why it's been a big deal in VFX. With a PBRT style renderer, everything is handled in a single monte carlo framework. And once you get an unbiased renderer that meets your standards, you can implement schemes like irradiance caching or photon mapping that introduce bias, but greatly accelerate rendering (and reduce noise). That o…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXo0WdlELJk I'm pleased to see that the tech video includes spherical mirrors. As I understand it, all raytracing demos are obliged by universal law to include at least three reflective balls in any promotion of the technology. One day, someone will figure out a game where these super-shiny ball bearings are a critical part of the gameplay, and at that point, raytracing will finally ta…
but with this you could have all the particle effects work properly in the reflection.