Another quick test with OTOY's Brigade engine showing 1024 physics driven Stanford dragons. Brigade has an extremely efficient way of handling dynamic instances and can now effortlessly render billions of (rigid) dynamic triangles in real-time.
All the recent instancing tests are not merely tests, but are part of a bigger project. More about that soon. In the meantime, enjoy the screenshots:
Just needed to share these jaw dropping images using Octane Render, they are too good to be true:
- ultra-detailed 17 million triangle human head mesh captured with OTOY's LightStage
- rendered with path tracing using physically based (unbiased) subsurface scattering
- HDRI environment map lighting
- 2048x1024 resolution
- completely noiseless after 8 seconds with just one GTX 680 using Octane Render v1.01 (which features environment map importance sampling)
And this is a 8192x4096 render (blogspot resized the image unfortunately). Note that all the detail is pure geometry, and is not coming from the normal maps
Found some time to do another quick instancing test with OTOY's Brigade engine:
- 1024 dynamic instances of a car (materials can be customized per instance, not shown yet)
- car model contains about 23k triangles
- 400k triangle city scene (can be instanced tens of times without performance loss)
It's now also possible to have a complete city with hundreds of instanced city blocks containing thousands of (instanced) animated characters and cars, essentially a real-time path traced photorealistic GTA. It's mighty impressive. But that's for another video :)
It's been a long time since I posted a video about Brigade (blame Octane Render, which is so fucking awesome and addictive it's not even funny anymore, check for example this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zfCn24bGGk&list=UL). But the latest addition on Brigade definitely deserves a new video: we now have instancing working, it's really useful (best part of the video at the end):
What you see here are 32x32 (1024) Stanford dragons, each containing 100k triangles for a total of more than 100 million triangles, all path traced in real-time. This number is actually quite modest, as we can easily scale up to billions of triangles and still be real-time. This is impossible to achieve with a rasterization based game engine. I'm convinced that instancing will be the decisive factor for game engines to switch to ray tracing and is actually going to be more important than having perfect shadows, reflections, refractions, indirect lighting, diffuse color bleeding, physically based materials, raytraced ambient occlusion and DOF.
The next step is to make practical use of this feature in a game like setting: I want to use the city scene from one of my earlier demos (see http://raytracey.blogspot.co.nz/2012_06_01_archive.html) and stuff it with instanced trees, cars and people, a bit like a real-time path traced GTA. It's doable.
