Real-time rendered animation previews with Octane Render

This is a major breakthrough in rendering: the last version of Octane Render can now render complex animatable objects completely in real-time with path tracing. This has never been done before and is a game changer for animation previsualisation.

Real-time ray tracing of scenes with highly detailed dynamic objects has always been considered as a near impossible feat and has held ray tracing back as a rendering method for interactive applications such as games. Until now: we have adapted Octane in such a way that it can handle dynamic scenes effortlessly and in real-time without compromising the ultrafast GPU path tracing performance.

The following video was made with the Octane plug-in for 3ds Max and demonstrates that the acceleration structure of the animated robot can be updated instantly while rendering an instant preview of the lighting. The transformer in the animation was used before in a demo that I've made with Brigade some time ago (http://raytracey.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/real-time-photorealistic-path-tracing.html) and I always wanted to see it animated and rendered in real-time with path tracing, which can now be done with Octane and will be shown in another video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31FvXIOxEVk (1080p)

This is the final render, with motion blur using subframes in 3ds Max:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NkN7JNbmnQ

Some screens from an early render:

UPDATE: a video of the same animation with materials

Another video, showing a real-time deforming hand, rendered with real-time path tracing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glSardxykPM

And a real-time rendered motion captured animation:

You'll be able to follow the progress of Octane Render and all of our tests on a dedicated blog soon (this post will also be moved to the new blog).

"Reconstructing the indirect light field for global illumination" paper finally available

It took some time, but the paper co-authored by Lehtinen, Aila, Laine and Durand is finally out. I've been looking forward to this paper for a few months and it surely doesn't disappoint:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/graphics/ilfr/ilfr_preprint.pdf

Aila and Laine (Nvidia research) are both geniuses when it comes to GPU path tracing, image reconstruction, SVO and GI in general and their papers are guaranteed to contain exciting (and reproducible) results. The paper includes some interesting comparisons between the new algorithm, the a-trous wavelet filter and random parameter filtering. Good stuff!

Real-time path traced dynamic geometry in Octane Render

OTOY NZ just released a preview build of Octane Render which supports instancing and real-time path traced dynamic geometry, check it out (1080p video):

More info here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22511

Brigade at Siggraph 2012

Brigade will be presented in the Real-Time Live! session at this year's Siggraph:

http://s2012.siggraph.org/attendees/sessions/brigade-real-time-photorealistic-rendering-gpu-path-tracing

Other noteworthy game engines on display are Uncharted 3, the Luminous engine and Unreal Engine 4, so we're up there with the creme de la creme of the game industry :D

Be there or you will regret it forever.

Change of jobs...

I'm incredibly proud to announce that, starting today, I'm officially part of the Octane Render team at OTOY New Zealand (formerly Refractive Software).

You can check out the official announcement on the Octane Render forum here: 

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22259 

I've been following Octane Render (the fastest unbiased GPU renderer in the world) since the day it was announced in January 2010 (see http://raytracey.blogspot.co.nz/2010/01/octane-render-realtime-gpu-based.html) and have always believed that it had an extremely bright future because it was essentially the closest thing to my dream of real-time cinema-quality graphics. 

The recently released plug-ins for Max and Maya combined with some recent breakthroughs on the workflow front will allow for some extremely cool and unseen stuff. Can't wait to get my hands dirty on it.