Hayssam Keilany aka iCELaGlacE joins OTOY

Excellent news everybody! Hayssam Keilany, creator of iCEnhancer and best known for his photorealistic GTA IV mod, has joined our ever growing OTOY team in New Zealand to apply his lighting magic on the Brigade engine and Octane Render, the only renderers capable of real-time path tracing of dynamic scenes. With iCELaGlacE on board, we will bring Octane and Brigade to a whole new level, completely blurring the line between real and virtual scenes. I'm confident to say that within one year, we will have 100% movie quality animations and games running in real-time in the cloud. Fun times ahead!

Announcement on Octane forum: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=23532

iCEnhancer facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/icenhancer

iCELaGlacE blog: http://icelaglace.wordpress.com/

Shot from GTA IV with iCEnhancer:

 

Real-time path tracing: racing game

This post is for the long time followers of this blog: one year ago, I've created a real-time path traced racing/physics game called "Unbiased Stunt Racer" (see http://raytracey.blogspot.co.nz/2011/09/unbiased-stunt-racer-in-hd.html). The game could run in real-time with path tracing because it only used spheres and boxes as primitives (about 50 primitives in total). Here's a screenshot:

Now, one year later, we can path trace dynamic scenes containing millions of triangles in real-time with Brigade, so the progress we made was not that bad. As a proof-of-concept, we've created a small racing game featuring a tiny race car, complete with physics. Thanks to some further optimizations, Brigade is now rapidly approaching a point where it can instantaneously render noise-free photorealistic images. The video below isn't even using the latest code (which has massively improved support for dynamic scenes) yet. The photorealism you can get out of Brigade nowadays is unrivaled and unique in the world of game engines. The potential of this tech is endless: for example, the automotive industry can render a photoreal and interactive car commercial in real-time or allow their customers to virtually drive around in a photoreal 3D city with the car of their dreams reflected in the display windows... 

Video (5 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJLy-ci-RyY

 

Real-time photorealistic physics experiments with Octane Render continued

As a follow-up to the previous post, here's another real-time rendered test with the Octane for 3ds Max plug-in, using MassFX and Voronoi shatter. Thanks to the extremely high rendering speed of Octane, users can now edit every aspect of a movie in final photorealistic quality in real-time: lighting, materials and most importantly geometry. This is the ultimate dream of every CG artist. From here, it's not that hard to imagine this technology being used in a real game...

The following video and screenshots were rendered on one GTX 590. Note the rendertimes and resolutions of the Octane viewports:

  

Real-time photorealistic physics experiments with Octane Render

Some real-time rendered physics experiments I did with Octane Render (the ultrafast unbiased GPU renderer) and MassFX in 3ds Max 2012. The instant ultrahigh quality feedback of Octane is extremely enjoyable for this kind of experiments, it can update thousands of objects in real-time and render them in full photorealistic detail using path tracing. It feels like editing a prerendered animation in real-time, it just utterly amazes me that this is possible today.

Enjoy these videos:

 (the banding on the sky in the video is a compression artefact from my capturing software, the actual image doesn't suffer from it)

 

By the way, there is now a dedicated blog for Octane Render with incredible stuff, check it out here:

http://render.otoy.com/newsblog/

Real-time path traced Brigade demo at Siggraph (screens + video)

Real-time path tracing is back. I haven't posted Brigade updates for a while, but development has never been stronger. This post is for the unhappy few who weren't able to attend Siggraph this year and couldn't witness our face-meltingly awesome Brigade demo with their own eyes. For your convenience, I have captured a video and a few screens of the Brigade demo, which you can see below.

Brigade's path tracing performance has gotten an enormous boost once again (thanks to the awesome work of Jeroen van Schijndel and Jacco Bikker), this time specifically for dynamic stuff. The demo shows a real-time dynamic water mesh, a skinned game character (from the IGAD student game 'It's about time') and an exploding horse. Since Siggraph the performance for dynamic scenes has almost tripled again.

What you see in the video is not exactly what was shown at Siggraph. The actual Siggraph demo was rendered with real-time path tracing at 1280x720 resolution at 60 fps and was running in OTOY's cloud with post processing. (My local system is not capable of video capturing and rendering with Brigade at 720p, so I had to turn down the resolution to get an acceptable framerate, the video is also using pretty ancient Brigade code, without the dynamic optimizations).

Without further ado, here's some screenshots and a video of the future of real-time graphics. Enjoy!

 Fin.