Real-time photorealistic GPU path tracing: Streets of Asia with dynamic water

The video from the previous blogpost got over 75,000 views on Youtube, just a tad more than the usual 200 or so views per vid, so I decided to upgrade it a bit with a Stanford dragon and some teapots with glossy materials. Jeroen van Schijndel (OTOY developer working on Brigade) implemented dynamic water that also reacts to the player (test made with Brigade). It's nothing short of amazing to see the water ripples rendered with real-time reflection and refraction. The BVH acceleration structure for the mesh describing the water surface is updated every frame allowing for real-time path traced water. Brigade also got an incredible speed boost since the previous demo, it's even more real-time now :):

 

 

4 minute Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-naYSmhGOY

Stay tuned for a new demo of a photoreal, real-time path traced massive modern city, which I will reveal very soon. A preview screenshot (still lots of materials to tweak):

Real-time GPU path tracing: Streets of Asia screens + video

UPDATE August 2012: much higher quality video and screens with dynamic objects, shown at Siggraph 2012, at the following link: 
http://raytracey.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/real-time-path-traced-brigade-demo-at.html

"The Streets of Asia" from Stonemason is a superb 3D scene to showcase what Brigade is capable of. The geometry and texture detail rivals what you see in today's highest end PC games. Combined with the real-time path traced lighting provided by OTOY's Brigade engine, the resulting images become stunningly photorealistic. Jeroen van Schijndel, a genius and self-taught programmer who develops OTOY's Brigade version, helped me with the materials and the moving sun. I really love this scene, so I took no less than twenty screenshots for your viewing pleasure:

Youtube video (6 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZlCWLbwC-0

These graphics will be possible in games in the very near future. The Brigade engine can be used not only for games but for all kinds of virtual reality applications and photorealistic simulators. Imagine walking in a photorealistic 3D version of the ancient Rome, or a fully navigable and photoreal Google Streetview in 3D. With dedicated fixed function ray tracing hardware this could be done at 1080p/60fps.

UPDATE: I'm on the frontpage of Kotaku!!! Yay :D

Real-time path tracing: modern city

While the medieval cities from SketchUp were fantastic test models, I also wanted to see what a more modern city would look like in Brigade:

The above city scene is great as a test to show that Brigade can handle huge scenes, but it is unfortunately quite low on geometric detail, so I looked further and found a much more detailed scene with very high resolution textures ("Streets of Asia" by StoneMason). 

This is what games made with Brigade will look like in real-time:

The scene is truly beautiful in motion. Expect a video tomorrow.

Brigade: animation test WIP1

Testing Brigade's animation system with the fat zombie from Doom 3, real-time path traced on 2 GTX 580s:

The acceleration structure for the animated zombie mesh is updated every frame.