Monday, September 28, 2015

GPU pathtracer now with textures

Hi! I added textures and depth of field some time ago but I didn't have time to make a video, so here it is a quick one with some models I found on the web.
Running at 1280x800 with a humble GTX 670
I have an Oculus Rift version too, but as expected, any small movement of your head makes the pathtracing restart, so I guess it's not too useful :) And well, after some tests I don't think realtime raytracing will be used for games at least in the next 15 years.
Hope you like it!



2 comments:

Jorge Gascon Perez said...

Hi Tony, I'm Jorge Gascon Perez (Laurent Garcia introduced us some minutes ago).

Impressive work men!

Regarding how to accelerate the rendering per frame, maybe a technique called "Bake" could be useful for you. A "bake" stores the raytracing computations in the surface of the objects, like a texture. I have found a video where Baking is explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB09T--_ZvU

I'm mainly interested in getting the quality of a raytracer but in real time, using OpenGL: An example of this could be: https://cgcookie.com/2015/05/20/pbr-in-blenders-viewport/

Very glad to meet you, Tony!

Tony Ambles said...

Hey Jorge,

thanks mate, I'm glad you like it! :)
The baking method seems really interesting, not sure how feasible would be in big environments and more than one light bounces, given the limitations of the GPU memory, but it seems worth to try.
The main problem I see with raytracing nowadays is that the resolution of screens and specially VR keeps growing, so 1920x1080 was alright (and it's still too much for realtime raytracing), but 4k will probably be the next standard and even that would be not enough for vr. So, that's really bad for raytracing as the number of pixels to trace grows like crazy.

But we'll see, writing a raytracer is a lot of fun,anyway :D

Cheers mate, hope we can talk in person soon! :)

Tony