Real-time path tracing: Urban street 720p video

I've made a much higher quality video of the scene in the previous post (the Backstreets by Stonemason), rendered in real-time with Brigade at 1280x720 resolution on 2 GTX 580 GPUs (recommended to watch in 720p):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evfXAUm8D6k

Unfortunately, the video quality is pretty bad with lots of splotchy artifacts due to Youtube's video compression. The original video file (1.85 GB AVI) can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ivqouikojbtf3t/Brigadestreet.avi 

 

Color bleeding test, note the reddish glow on the building's facade getting stronger with more sunlight:

Dynamic mesh light test: 

- a light emitting Stanford bunny mesh illuminates the scene and casts soft shadows. The bunny is fully dynamic.

- a light emitting Doom 3 zombie which can be animated as well:

Real-time path tracing: urban backstreets WIP1 UPDATE: video added

Some screens of a new scene (which might eventually be used in a small proof-of-concept game), rendered in real-time with Brigade (the scene is called "the Backstreets" and was made by Stonemason):

UPDATE: video

Sci-fi interior WIP 2: video

Short video of the scene in the previous post, rendered in real-time with the Brigade path tracer:

I really love playing around with this thing, the graphics are so utterly insane. I'm not easily impressed, but every time I fire up Brigade, my jaw falls to the floor. You can't believe how many times I had to visit a maxillofacial surgeon for that. But it's worth it.

Sci-Fi interior rendered with Brigade WIP 1

First WIP screens from a highly detailed sci-fi scene:

This is quite a challenge for Brigade, because it's an enclosed environment with fairly complex geometry lit by multiple small mesh lights (no light from the sky or sun), a dreaded cause of Monte Carlo path tracing noise. In brief, a perfect environment to test Brigade's convergence speed. Much to my surprise, this scene converges extremely fast (as fast as an open outdoor scene lit by sun+sky), even with very small lights. Brigade never ceases to amaze me. More screens and video soon.  

UPDATE: for comparison reasons, a screenshot of the original sci-fi scene (created by Stonemason/Stefan Morrell), which was rendered with finalRender can be seen here: http://stefan-morrell.cgsociety.org/gallery/536375. Brigade rivals the quality of finalRender, but more importantly, it does it in real-time.   

Real-time photorealistic GPU path tracing: first exposure test

Thanks to another recent speed boost, Brigade is now able to render real-time photorealistic animations of huge urban scenes with dynamic day/night cycle at 1280x720 resolution and 20+ fps on 2 GTX 580 GPUs, including all the physically based light effects you expect from a path tracer:

- real raytraced depth-of-field
- perfect soft shadows
- true ambient occlusion
- indirect lighting with diffuse interreflection/color bleeding
- specular and glossy reflection
- refraction
- ... the whole shebang. 

The coolest thing about Brigade is that all of these effects are virtually free and can be used aplenty. It's the magic of path tracing.

720p video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu52dCLAb6E

These screenshots are from an early exposure/post fx test:

Blinn bunny

Big blurry breakdancing Bunny rendered with the breathtakingly beautiful Blinn shader using Brigade:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4cx5Q4Woq8

Real-time photorealstic GPU path tracing: Blinn

I got the Blinn shader working at last. It adds a huge amount of realism and completely transforms the scene. In the screenshots below, it's only applied to the roads and some metal objects:

 

Real-time photorealistic GPU path tracing: Urban Sprawl 2 at double speed!

As requested by a reader of this blog, I've tested the performance of the most recent Brigade code in the Urban Sprawl 2 scene with the same camera viewpoint as in the screenshot from the previous post. As of yesterday, Brigade is now twice as fast when converging (at no extra cost), thanks to moving a critical part of the rendering code to the GPU. 

Short video of Urban Sprawl 2, rendered in real-time on 2 GTX 580 GPUs at 1280x720 resolution (highly recommended to watch in 720p):

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN7PO0jJRvg

(Youtube seems to have messed up again by auto-correcting the contrast and color saturation, I'm trying to fix that.)

Real-time photorealistic GPU path tracing: animation test

Brigade 2 real-time path tracing test of a (self-made) weapon in first person view and a simple animated character (Doom 3 fat zombie):

Video (5 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rckLya4Welk

Things I'm working on for this scene:

- post processing effects like HDR bloom and motion blur

- GUI with sliders for spp, material properties, ...

- user-controlled car with camera following the vehicle

- physics

- a simple game: a Quake 3 style deathmatch FPS with an oldskool AI bot jumping over the roofs and some cars that will run over the player Frogger-style. The player will also be able to fire a grapple at a building's facade and swing in Spiderman fashion. Intricate storyline with unexpected plot twists TBD.

Laguna: real-time OpenCL path tracer

Arjan van Wijnen created a new real-time experimental OpenCL path tracer, called Laguna. It runs surprisingly fast and uses a seemingly new kind of grid-like acceleration structure (which the author calls a "precalculated blocks structure").  Something to keep an eye on.

Screenshots and executable demo at http://www.geeks3d.com/20120502/laguna-real-time-opencl-path-tracer/. You can change parameters like resolution, samples per pixel, number of bounces and grid size in the 'scene.txt' file.