It's official! OTOY, the company that made the jaw-droppingly realistic Ruby demo for ATI's Radeon R700 GPUs back in 2008 (which was the original reason to start this blog), has unveiled that it has bought Refractive Software, the New Zealand based developer of Octane Render, the absurdly fast unbiased GPU renderer (a nice and very recent user review of Octane render can be found at http://motionleague.com/2012/02/octane-render-review/).
OTOY has previously announced a deal with Refractive Software and Autodesk (http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2011/08/otoy-partners-with-gpu-path-tracing.html and http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2011/10/otoy-partners-with-autodesk-to-stream.html) to deliver real-time rendering solutions using GPU path tracing through the cloud.
Brigade, the real-time GPU path tracer designed for games, is going to be jointly developed by Jacco Bikker, Jeroen van Schijndel and OTOY and will lift the graphical realism of games to never before seen levels.
I'm also immensely proud to say that I am now working with OTOY to get the best out of real-time GPU path tracing and pursue the holy CG grail of real-time photorealistic rendering.
You can read all the details in this article at VentureBeat:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/02/otoy-buys-refractive-software-and-announces-cloud-based-digital-animation-technology-exclusive/ (regular readers of this blog might recognize the picture in the article ;-)
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/02/otoy-buys-refractive-software-and-announces-cloud-based-digital-animation-technology-exclusive/ (regular readers of this blog might recognize the picture in the article ;-)
14 comments:
Sam,
Should I be worried with this announcement that Jacco will no longer post Brigade updates(2.X, 3.0) on his website for use to test/play around with?
I'm not sure, but I think updates will still be posted (with precompiled libraries).
I wonder if OTOY is really going to release any of their stuff; they have announced their technology like 3 years ago, but it's still nowhere to be found in the marketplace. The ATI Cinema 2.0 tech demos are vaporware (maybe because they are not employing real interactive ray tracing, so they didn't release it publicly because they didn't wanted to eat crow by their allegations, but I could be wrong). Their announced CGI movie/video game 'Gaiking' looks like it's dead on the water (maybe because due to lack of funding/interest).
I wonder if really they are going to make a big splash this year, hopefully on this next E3.
If not, they are going to lose big time to competitors OnLive and GAKAI.
It's nice that these news appears from time to time, however, from what I understand, Octane Render lacks a lot of important features to really be considered in implementing it into the workflows of VFX studios (like sub-surface scattering for example and there's also several limitations by GPU, like limited VRAM, etc)
So yeah, I'm kinda skeptical about this company, but I wish they could prove me wrong because I'll love to see cloud photo-realistic rendering on-the-fly.
Uh WHAT?? you were just approaching this as a hobby and now it turned into a CAREER with OTOY? OMG what a Dream!!! I hope I can do something like this someday!
FreDre: just be a little patient ;) Octane does have SSS btw.
Anonymous: yep, that's exactly what happened :D
Alright, cool that more news are coming.
However, now that you work for OTOY, does that mean that you won't update your blog as frequently? Like they will make you sign a NDA or something like that.
That would suck :/
Really enjoy reading this blog
no worries, there will still be images and videos of research experiments with Brigade. I'm now in the process of debugging the physics. Expect to see some demos with animated lights (swinging lamps/ moving sun) soon.
Brigade has been licensed by OTOY quite a while ago, and the latest libraries / binaries were distributed after that date. So don't worry: there will be new versions, and there will be plenty of support for indie game development using Brigade. In fact, that's the whole point. :)
- Jacco.
if things really stay open as before, then this really is a good thing :D
Interesting times indeed, if rumors hold true, nvidia next generation flagship GPU will house 2304 cuda core(Q3 2012), Brigade should run great! will enough to make a simple "game" like "Dear Esther" at 1920 X 1080, perhaps?
Sup sam, its radiant.
Terrence has said that you will be joining the refractive stuff with your connection with bridge.
Its good to see you excelling, i remember back in 2009 reading your blogs, now your part of a world recognized company
Anonymous: Kepler looks indeed very interesting. With a much higher shader count than Fermi (1536 shaders for the GK104 and a rumoured 2304 shaders for the GK110), it should be quite a monster at GPU path tracing, which struggles with SIMD efficiency. I never heard of "Dear Esther", but it looks great actually.
radiant: wassup man? long time no seen! I can't say much about future plans, but I can say that this collaboration between Brigade and Octane will result in something groundbreaking ;)
Hi, Ray Tracey. I read your blog from the beginning of it's creation and I'm glad that your dream, your passion has turned into your job. This is the best that man could wish for.
Thanks neD80! That's exactly how I feel right now :)
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