61–70 of 99 posts
The biggest problem here is content.. Producing content is the most expensive aspect of a game. Improvement in tooling and reuse are the only way we can actually properly use better rendering
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I'm sorry but there is a pronounced industry trend exactly against what you argue. Physically based rendering is winning out almost everywhere. A straightforward path tracer is capable of simulating nearly all the physics of light to any desired degree of fidelity. Part of why it's won out is that it's actually far simpler for artists to work in terms of real world material concepts vs tuning abstract parameters in f…
Physically-based rendering has little to do with global illumination, and is only really about the BRDF [1] used for computing the final pixel color based on a number of inputs for that point in space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...
A nice blog about real time path tracing is: http://raytracey.blogspot.nl/
If true, color me impressed!
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You might feel differently if you ever had to do shadow mapping on traditional hardware. Even in AAA games, there are tons of artifacts in the shadows. Same goes for reflections. I don't see why it's harder for artists to control the results... can you elaborate? It seems like it's going to be 90% the same. You have a point on a surface, you have a camera vector and light vectors, you supply a small piece of code and…
> The differences for artists are that they'll have to learn a system with different limitations. If current-generation AAA games are any indication, either very few artists ever learned the raster workarounds or few artists ever had time to implement the workarounds. I think ray-tracing will be a game changer. Raster shadows are easy to get subtly wrong and very difficult to get right. Cube-maps are easy to get subt…
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But that is because of hardware capability... i.e. computers weren't good enough for artists to work with... wasn't it? I've been out of the 3D world for a while, but Ray tracing was the be-all-end-all/holy grail of 3d. It is simulating light... you can't do better than physics.
Raytracing has its limitations, subsurface scattering for example.
Two thoughts: I would love to see a video of a dynamic environment (aka actors/objects moving in a scene). Also, how long before cryptocurrency miners use these to gain step function over current gpus.
Ugh. Never. Computing a hash won't be any faster on these GPUs.
It's best to remember that ray tracing isn't the be all and end all of graphics since it's far harder for artists to control the results than the other hacked up ways. One consequence of this is their example comparison, where I think it's entirely subjective to say the ray traced output is better. Neither is particularly great. The big win is around indirect lighting, but the development of that in standard rasteris…
I'm sorry man, but that sounds crazy. Raytraced scenes are much easier for artists to control the results because things actually behave like you would intuitively expect (if the amount of rays is high enough). If raytraced scenes were hard to control, why would every single animated movie be raytraced? Raytracing really is the be all and end all of graphics. The more rays you can render, the more realistic your scen…
Likely you're both right, and while it's harder to learn how to dink scenes and assets with ad-hoc rendering techniques than just use raytracing, an artist who has already mastered the black arts of tweaking everything just so is going to resent losing that control and having to let the physics take over.