Real-time Ray Tracing!

[Dark Jaguar]

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Wow... Sure, it doesn't look as good as this same game using "normal" methods, but this is intended as a proof of concept. It won't be something that can be done right now, they're using 4 servers linked together, but think of 5 years from now and we may see GPU/CPU combo chips that can do this themselves, stacking up with other rendering tricks as people learn how to properly make use of this method. The point is just how amazing what it does can do it. I'm in awe over those reflections, but really that's EXACTLY the only way that surface CAN respond to light reflection, which is all ray-tracing is. It's also extremely processor intensive, hence why it's taken so long to get to this point.

[etoven]

Now show me real time occulsion...
This one I did took about 3 minutes to render.

[Great Rumbler]

There are a number of games out now that have ambient occlusion.

[Dark Jaguar]

Nice, very nice, but that's 3 minutes for a single image, as opposed to real time at 80 frames per second (notably choppier when they zoomed in on that chandelier, but still watchable). I think that real time occlusion is actually included under ray tracing though. That is, if it's tracing how images are displayed based on where light is going, then shadowing follows naturally. That and all the other things ray tracing would remove the need for are why it's the holy grail of 3D rendering.

[etoven]

There are a number of games out now that have ambient occlusion.

That must be some kind of hack.. The last video I saw on YouTube, the guy said his quad core i7 took 18 hours to render a 3 minute video.

[Dark Jaguar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)

There's an image there demonstrating that ray tracing fully implemented does include ambient occlusion.

[Great Rumbler]

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_ambien..._home.html

[Dark Jaguar]

That's neat.

[etoven]

In those examples I see ambient occlusion for shadowing but I don't see anything glowing like in my render. I'm still forced to wonder how long glowing objects will still take to calculate. It used to be called radiosidy but now the faster method is called approximate gather. In blender it's called Indirect Lighting, with approximate gather. Incidentally, you have to turn off ray traced gather for indirect lighting to work.