Real-time path traced Virtual Reality

With the GTC almost over, we can finally unveil what we've been working on for the past seven months. Brigade has made massive progress during that time in all areas: performance, quality, sampling efficiency and tremendously improved support for dynamic scenes and multi-GPU setups.

The level of realism in Brigade is just absurd and playing with it often feels like you're watching a real life movie.

We love playing GTA, so we set out to make a real-time path traced GTA like demo to be shown at Nvidia's GTC conference (and also next week at the GDC). The plan was to have hundreds of cars and pedestrians populating a living and breathing city, all path traced in real-time. A rather ambitious goal, since path tracing this kind of highly dynamic scenes in real-time was never done before, but do we love a challenge! After doing successful tests with hundreds of moving cars and characters in a city environment, we added physics, which slowed things down massively so we had to settle on just one car. Brigade was blowing our minds, time and time again, it renders monstrously fast.

The video below shows some of our tests rendered at 1280x72:

- the city scene has 750 instanced animated characters (30k triangles each, in total 22.5 million animated triangles), all of them physics driven with Bullet physics in a 600k triangle city

- the Piazza scene is fantastic to test color bleeding, there are 16384 instances of a 846k triangle city, 13.8 billion triangles in total, rendered in real-time

- interior scene from Octane Render, created by Enrico Cerica, 1 million triangles rendered in real-time

We will post screenshots and a lot more videos after the GDC.

Prepare to be flabberghasted...

After the successful presentation at Siggraph 2012, Brigade will rear its ugly ahead again in public next week. This time it's Nvidia's GTC conference, where OTOY will have a 50 minute talk on Tuesday, showing off Brigade, Octane Render and LightStage. Make sure to be there if you want to see the scene below running in real-time:

It's going to simultaneously blow your mind and socks off your feet (I'm still not completely recovered from the breath taking beauty) and you will regret it for the rest of your life if you won't be there. However, in the unlikely case that you can't make it to the conference, do not despair, because I'll post tons of screenshots and videos when the event is over. 

Real-time GPU path traced Gangnam style

Not that many updates lately, during the last two months we've been working on a kick-ass Brigade tech demo that will be shown on a conference in the second half of this month. I'll post screenshots and videos posted after the event, but in the meantime we're still doing some smaller tests, such as this as animated character instance test. The video and screenshots are rendered with Brigade's superfast path tracing kernel (maxdepth 6) and show 12 instanced characters animated in real-time. 

 

 

             

Update: Some teaser images of a new scene, rendered in real-time with very nice color bleeding and real-time post processing:

 

More to come soon

Real-time GPU path tracing: Cubed City

 

A new test with the Brigade path tracer, showing 1024 physics driven dynamic cubes in a street scene. It's incredibly fun to fly through a photoreal scene in real-time while tons of cubes are falling from the sky in slow motion and being able to change all the lighting and materials at the same time. The beauty of how instancing works in Brigade is that moving hundreds or even thousands of rigid objects happens for free, with almost no impact on the rendering performance. Brigade also doesn't care much about how many polygons these rigid objects contain: a 100K poly Stanford dragon will render nearly as fast as 3K poly Utah teapot. This opens up a lot of possibilities: you could for example render scenes with hundreds of spaceships flying around in an extremely detailed procedurally generated landscape. Dealing with non-rigid meshes like animated characters is a bit harder for a path tracer, because acceleration structures need to be updated every frame, but we have a solution to that problem as well (that's something for another post :) In the meantime, enjoy the video and screenshots below:

720p video:

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Real-time GPU path tracing: Physics dragons 2

The following video accompanies the screenshots from the previous post:

 

It shows 1024 dynamic instances of a Stanford dragon model of 100k triangles each, for a total of 100 million triangles, path traced with Brigade in real-time. Brigade easily allows path tracing of several billion triangles in real-time (we tried 4096 randomly spinning instances of the Asian city model which contains over 400k triangles, and the framerate was surprisingly fluent). This is impossible with OpenGL or DirectX. This is the prime reason why games must switch to a pure ray tracing or path tracing approach (hybrid raster/ray tracing will just not work) if game developers want to have scenes with several hundred million triangles filling the screen. And that's not even taking the perfect soft shadows, depth of field, reflections, refractions, arbitrary BRDFs and color bleeding into account.

Real-time GPU path tracing: Physics dragons

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:

 

Photorealistic head with Octane Render

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

Another one:

More screens here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=25052

Real-time GPU path tracing: Unbiased Cab City WIP 1

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 :)

UPDATE: Yes! Ich bin mit diesen Demo auf die grossen Deutschen website PC Games Hardware erschenen, das ist ja ganz toll! :D : http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Raytracing-Hardware-255905/News/Brigade-Engine-Raytracing-GTA-Stil-1040284/