This page is a collection of events at SIGGRAPH about ray & path tracing and closely-related topics, such as sampling. Please let me know of anything to fix or to add, especially exhibitor booth talks related to ray tracing (I have just NVIDIA's at this point). Poster sessions are not listed, see the Display & Rendering poster list in particular.
The short link to this page: http://bit.ly/rtrt2019
Don't take this page as gospel, I'm just consolidating what I found when I found it, and I've seen some listings change over time. Check the links or SIGGRAPH 2019 Full Program page to be sure about location and time.
Sunday 2pm - 5:15pm, Room 152, SIGGRAPH Course: Introduction to Real-Time Ray Tracing (course slides)
Description:
We explain how to create real-time ray tracing systems using the latest GPU and CPU acceleration APIs, including DirectX 12 ray tracing. You will learn to implement a simple photorealistic renderer from scratch in C, and then how to ray trace video game scenes in real time on a GPU.
Sunday 2pm - 5:15pm, Room 403AB, SIGGRAPH Course: Path Guiding in Production (course notes)
Description:
We share our practical experience with path guiding that we gained from production rendering systems at Weta Digital and the Walt Disney Animation Studios and also from our research in this area. We provide suggestions for important avenues of future research. We also cover introduction to path guiding.
Sunday 5pm - 6pm, Room 309, Los Angeles Convention Center, Birds of a Feather:
Demoscene Worldwide
Description: Demoscene was born in the computer underground, and demos are the product of extreme programming and self-expression. This session reveals the best of new and old-school demoscene. (Some demoscene productions are ray traced/marched/cast, e.g., these 256 byte programs: Puls (video), Tube (video), Megapole (video).)
Monday 9:15am - 10am, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Real Time Ray Tracing and the
Demand of Architectural Visualization, Carlos Cristerna (Neoscape) (video)
Description:
For over 23 years Neoscape has been crafting experiences of built environments for clients around the
world. Join us to see how we are using real time raytracing from the lens of Neoscape’s production
experience and the impact on the internal design and decision-making process, as well as our clients. With
the aid of NVIDIA Quadro RTX technology and Lenovo workstations we will deep dive into the process and
challenges of Exterior HDRI lighting, large and small office interiors with numerous polygons, and complex
shaders created in 3DSmax-Vray imported through UE4 Datasmith. All of this in one of Manhattans newest
skyscrapers.
Monday 2pm - 5:15pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: GPU Ray Tracing for Film and Design (NVIDIA listing)
Description:
GPU-accelerated ray tracing is delivering new levels of interactivity and performance to rendering for film and design. Ray tracing leaders from NVIDIA, Autodesk, Chaos Group and Weta Digital will describe how the NVIDIA OptiX API is evolving rapidly, how to get the best performance from it, and how it is being used in production. We will also see how interactive ray tracing is drawing inspiration from real-time ray tracing methods as well as from advanced off-line methods.
Monday 3pm - 7:30pm, The Orpheum Theatre, 842 South Broadway, Unreal Engine SIGGRAPH 2019 User Group Meeting (register) (video)
Description: We’ll have networking, beverages, and demos starting at 3 PM, followed by an amazing lineup of presentations starting at 4 PM. Our featured guests include ILMxLAB, Walt Disney Imagineering, Digital Domain, The Third Floor, Cine Tracer, and more! You’ll also get to find out what’s next for Unreal Engine in the media and entertainment space from our CTO Kim Libreri. (schedule and speakers)
Monday 3:30pm - 4:30pm, Room 406B, Intel Exhibitor Session: Ray Tracing with Intel Embree and Intel OSPRay: Use Cases and Updates, Dmitry Babokin, Jefferson Amstutz, and Pete Brubaker (Intel)
Description: Intel ISPC is a high level language and compiler for explicit SIMD programming of the CPU. We will provide a brief introduction to ISPC and then quickly dive into more advanced techniques, all based on real-world usage from applications such as Intel OSPRay and Epics Unreal Engine. The session will cover practical elements, such as performance profiling, debugging and porting advice as well as advanced programming topics such as common design patterns, SIMD lane interop, data conversions and more.
Tuesday 10am - 10:25am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: A Fast Forward through Ray Tracing Gems, Eric Haines (NVIDIA) (video, slides)
Description: The new book "Ray Tracing Gems" (free electronically) is a collection of 32 articles by experts in the field. The first editor will give a rapid-fire run-through of its contents.
Tuesday 10am - 10:25am, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Interactive and Cinematic Ray Tracing of Cellular and Molecular Biology with OptiX and RTX Acceleration, John Stone (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign)
This talk will describe how VMD, a widely used molecular visualization tool
with over 100,000 users, leverages the OptiX ray tracing framework
to enable high fidelity interactive renderings for exploratory
scientific visualizations and high throughput movie renderings.
In particular we will describe how VMD and OptiX were used to
produce cinematic renderings of the key molecular processes involved
in photosynthesis for the new fulldome movie "Birth of Planet Earth"
and the excerpt as shown in the SIGGRAPH 2019 Electronic Theater Selection:
"Birth of Planet Earth" Fulldome Excerpt: Photosynthesis in a Chromatophore.
Tuesday 10:30am - 11am, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Adding RTX acceleration to Iray with OptiX, Lutz Kettner (NVIDIA) (video, slides)
Description: Used in Siemens NX, Dassault Systèmes Catia and Solidworks, along with other leading product design packages, the Iray rendering engine and MDL (Material Definition Language) deliver predictable, simulation-quality photorealistic imagery with full artistic freedom. In this talk we will present our approach to enable NVIDIA RTX technology and RT Cores within Iray. We will present architectural decisions made to leverage the latest version of OptiX and explain what affects performance in practice.
Tuesday 10:45am - 12:35pm, Room 153, SIGGRAPH Technical Papers: High Performance Rendering
First paper:
Tuesday 11am - 12 noon, Room 507, Los Angeles Convention Center, Birds of a Feather:
Ray Tracing Roundtable, moderator: Eric Haines
Description: This informal BOF is a chance to meet and talk with other developers and researchers working with ray and path tracing algorithms. (We used to have these from the late 1980's to 2001 - time to bring it back. 60 person room limit.)
Tuesday 11am - 12:15pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: NVIDIA Omniverse: An Open, USD Based Collaboration Platform for Constructing and Simulating Virtual Worlds, Michael Kass, Frank DeLise, Tae-Yong Kim (NVIDIA) (video)
Description: With NVIDIA Omniverse, teams can interactively work together to create, animate, and render 3D worlds using industry-standard creative software. Join our session to see what’s new and explore the modules that make up Omniverse and how they create a seamless experience for end users. This will be an interactive session with live demonstrations of real-time collaborative ray tracing on USD content. Overview:
Tuesday 11:30am - 12:15pm, Room 404A, Autodesk Exhibitor Session: What’s new with Arnold GPU, Fred Servant (Autodesk)
Description: Arnold 5.3 launched the open beta for Arnold GPU, showcasing the potential of rendering workflows combining GPU and CPU. We’ll share the progress we’ve made on Arnold GPU based on beta feedback and share real world production examples of the impact of Arnold GPU.
Tuesday 11:30am - 11:55am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Getting Started with DirectX Ray Tracing in Unity, Tian Ning (Unity) (video, another video, slides - see her other session below at 4:30)
Description: Learn how to use the experimental ray tracing features introduced in the 19.3 Unity beta! This talk begins with an overview of DXR, in context of how to use Unity's new API to implement GPU ray tracing. The second half describes the ray tracing features offered by the High-Definition Render Pipeline and how they were implemented. If you're curious about ray tracing works in Unity, but don't want to get bogged down in algorithms, this is the talk for you!
Tuesday 1pm - 1:30pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: An RTX-tra Substance Painter Feature, presenter: Nikie Monteleone (DreamWorks Animation TV) (video)
Description: The Surfacing Artist has always been confronted with adapting texture to their 3D content. While Painter has revolutionized 3D painting, getting all the different textures prepared and "baked" for their asset is still a necessary step before and after getting to the actual painting phase. With RTX and hardware accelerated ray tracing now integrated in Painter, times for baking are dramatically reduced, allowing to quickly iterate between modeling and painting phases, many more design iterations and leaving room for actual artistic creativity instead of waiting for long compute times. Nikie will share her first experience with RTX baking in Substance Painter on actual assets and how it impacts her creative workflow.
Tuesday 2pm - 3pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Optimizing and Deploying Ray-Traced Dynamic Global Illumination, Morgan McGuire (NVIDIA) (video)
Description:
We describe a fast, scalable technique for ray tracing photorealistic global illumination. It upgrades standard static light probes to both fix light leaks and accelerate them for dynamic run-time ray tracing on any recent GPU. This streamlines art workflow, increases visual fidelity, and lifts lighting restrictions on gameplay. We describe this probe technique along with new implementation details that give a 2x performance increase and heightened image quality over previous versions. We also show how to accelerate ray traced reflections and full GPU path tracing using the same probe data structure, and discuss the road map for this technology. (related work, and more)
Tuesday 2pm - 5:15pm, Room 408AB, SIGGRAPH Course: Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering, moderators: Natalya Tatarchuk (Unity Technologies), Aaron Lefohn (NVIDIA) (course slides page - to appear)
Description:
This year’s course explores open issues in supporting real-time ray tracing in production real-time engines, delving into the open challenges in engine architecture design, material level of detail, light management, and the open research problems in bringing unified physically-based light transport to real-time applications and games.
Tuesday 2pm - 3pm, Room 409A, Chaos Group Exhibitor Session: Total Chaos @ SIGGRAPH Creating superheroes the V-Ray way (Digital Domain)
Description:
2019 marks the debut of Total Chaos @ SIGGRAPH, built off of Chaos Group’s inspirational computer graphics conference held in Sofia earlier this year. 10 talks over two days will reveal insight into this year’s biggest CGI projects from top VFX studios. You'll also learn about the latest V-Ray and Corona updates. Learn more.
Tuesday 2:30pm - 2:55pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Real Time Rendering and Raytracing on the Edge, Raheel Khalid (Verizon) (video)
Description: Verizon will talk about how they created a real time rendering pipeline and raytracer on the Edge Cloud using 5G, Unreal Engine and Nvidia RTX. These developments are now enabling high end RTX experiences on mobile phones and limited compute devices. The team will show the rendering pipeline, edge management system and Unreal Engine plugin that brings next generation experiences to customers.
Tuesday 3pm - 3:25pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: The Future of GPU Rendering: Real-Time Raytracing, Holographic Displays and Light Field Media, Jules Urbach (Otoy) (video)
Description: Verizon will talk about how they created a real time rendering pipeline and raytracer on the Edge Cloud using 5G, Unreal Engine and Nvidia RTX. These developments are now enabling high end RTX experiences on mobile phones and limited compute devices. The team will show the rendering pipeline, edge management system and Unreal Engine plugin that brings next generation experiences to customers.
Tuesday 4pm - 4:25pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Adding GPU Acceleration to Pixar Renderman, Max Liani (Pixar) (video)
Description: We'll discuss photo-realistic rendering in modern movie production and present the path that led us to leverage GPUs and CPUs in a new scalable rendering architecture. Learn about RenderMan XPU, Pixar's next-gen physically based production path tracer, and how we solve the problem of heterogeneous compute using a shared code base. We'll also discuss our partnership with NVIDIA to create the technology to enable art and creativity in future feature animation and live-action visual effects blockbusters.
Tuesday 4pm - 5pm, Room 409A, Chaos Group Exhibitor Session: Total Chaos @ SIGGRAPH Agile Workflow Tips With V-Ray for Houdini (Ingenuity Studios)
Description:
Ingenuity delivers a variety of VFX to over 50 shows, films and music videos during a typical season. This presentation will cover the workflows the studio deploys to meet deadlines while maintaining quality, including rapid asset development, transfer from Maya to Houdini, and scene assembly using V-Ray for Houdini.Learn more.
Tuesday 4:30am - 5:25am, Room 407, Unity Technologies Exhibitor Session: Leveraging Ray Tracing Hardware Acceleration in Unity, Tianliang Ning (Unity)
Dive into Unity’s real-time ray-tracing features, starting with the "Reality vs Illusion" demo made with our High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). You’ll learn about the implementation, optimization, and major design details that drive Unity's real-time ray tracing features such as reflections and area shadows.
Tuesday 5pm - 5:25pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA Adopts RTX, Xavier Melkonian (Dassault Systèmes) (video)
Description: This year at Siggraph, Dassault Systèmes is presenting how 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA takes benefit of NVIDIA RTX technology for design review on NVIDIA booth with an actual Renault Dacia production car 3D model. Xavier will present the details of the fully working CATIA proof of concept using both Quadro workstation and RTX Server, allowing accurate design decision making with physically correct geometry, material and rendering accelerated by NVIDIA RTX technology.
Tuesday 5:30pm - 5:55pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Autodesk Products & NVIDIA Omniverse, Dave Tyner (Autodesk) (video)
This talk is geared towards 3D professionals from all industries seeking to maximize value from their 3D pipelines. We’ll focus on effortlessly representing cross-industry content in photorealistic visual fidelity while maintaining access to project/object metadata. Autodesk is committed to leveraging advanced technology in the right way to provide value back to our customer’s design, make, and build workflows. We’re excited to show you how Autodesk is partnering with NVIDIA to deliver the next evolutionary leap forward for 3D professionals. Introducing Omniverse: A collaborative real-time data platform connecting toolsets and project stakeholders, at scale, in photorealistic visual fidelity.
We will demonstrate:
Tuesday 6pm - 7:45pm, West Hall B, Event: Real-Time Live!
Demos include:
Wednesday 9am - 10:45am, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Ray Tracing Special Topics, Latest Research (dated SIGGRAPH page)
Description:
The NVIDIA Research and Developer Technology teams will present the latest developments and techniques for ray tracing and their application to real-time rendering for games, simulation, and VR applications.
Wednesday 10:30am - 10:55am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Bringing the Arnold Renderer to the GPU, Adrien Herubel (Autodesk) (video)
Description: Join lead engineer for Arnold GPU, Adrien Herubel, to learn all about Arnold, Autodesk's Academy Award winning production renderer for visual effects in film and feature animation. Adrien will cover how Arnold was instrumental in the shift toward physically-based light transport simulation in production rendering, explore its ability to produce artifact-free images of dynamic scenes with massive complexity efficiently, and share an exclusive peek at the latest developments to Arnold GPU, accelerated by NVIDIA OptiX.
Wednesday 10:45am - 12:15pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Advanced Real-Time Ray Tracing Tutorial, Pawel Koslowski, Evan Hart, Alex Dunn, Aurelio Reis (NVIDIA) (SIGGRAPH page) (video)
Description:
The Developer Technology team at NVIDIA will share their experience from integrating, debugging, and profiling ray tracing while working with commercial engines and their content pipelines. This session is a good fit for anyone interested in our latest learnings (and how we got to diagnose them) from working on various demos, games, and publicly available engines like Unreal Engine 4.
Wednesday 11:30am - 11:55am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Prism & RTX, Victor Yudin (Technicolor/Mill Film) (video)
Description: We'll discuss Prism, a Technicolor initiative to produce a high-end OptiX-based path tracer for a fast preview of element, shots or sequences. It incorporates open source technologies like Open Subdivision Surface, Open Shading Language, and Pixar USD to produce a high level of fidelity and realism. We will explain why we chose to develop a modern GPU rendering system and the advantage of using it in collaboration to RTX graphic cards.
Wednesday noon - 12:25pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Collaborative Workflow for Media and Entertainment, Boris Ustaev (NVIDIA) (slides)
Description: Using USD, MDL, and real-time ray-tracing technology to build multi-user workflows with a high visual fidelity in real-time.
Wednesday 12:30am - 12:55am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Fundamentals of Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine, Sean Spitzer (Epic Games) (video)
Description: We'll discuss Prism, a Technicolor initiative to produce a high-end OptiX-based path tracer for a fast preview of element, shots or sequences. It incorporates open source technologies like Open Subdivision Surface, Open Shading Language, and Pixar USD to produce a high level of fidelity and realism. We will explain why we chose to develop a modern GPU rendering system and the advantage of using it in collaboration to RTX graphic cards.
Wednesday 1pm - 1:25pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: OptiX For Real Time Display Of Very Complex Scenes, Sebastian Guichou (Isotropix)
Description: Developed by Isotropix, Clarisse iFX is a high-end 3D DCC used by World’s best VFX and Animation studios working on Hollywood blockbusters. Powered by a modern architecture and a highly optimized CPU ray-tracer, Clarisse iFX lets artists interactively work on production scenes made of bazillions of polygons. During the past years, Isotropix has been working very closely with NVIDIA to accelerate its raytracer by leveraging the power of RTX through OptiX. In this talk, we will explain how TURING GPU increases ray-tracing performance by orders of magnitude to make Clarisse iFX ray-tracer speed jump from interactive to real-time even on most demanding VFX scenes composed of many billions of polygons. We’ll also discuss about the technical challenges we addressed and how we dealt with the trade-off between memory and interactive edits while maintaining a very high level of performance.
Wednesday 1pm - 2pm, Room 405, Exhibitor Tech Talk: Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine 4.23, Juan Cañada & Patrick Kelly (Epic Games)
Description:
Epic's Juan Cañada, Lead Engineer, and Patrick Kelly, Senior Rendering Programmer, offer a close-up look at ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4.23, and demonstrate the processes and techniques for creating cinematic-quality real-time lighting.
Wednesday 2pm - 5:15pm, Room 403AB, SIGGRAPH Course: Path Tracing in Production Part 2 (course notes)
Description:
Experts from the movie industry will share their insights and experiences from using path tracing in production. This is the second part of a full-day course, focusing on materials, GPU rendering, non-photorealistic techniques, and fur rendering. (extended abstract, syllabus)
Wednesday 2pm - 5:15pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Ray Tracing Gems 1.1 (slightly dated SIGGRAPH page)
Description:
The new book "Ray Tracing Gems" (free electronically) is a collection of 32 articles by experts in the field. Authors of selected articles will discuss their papers and present recent updates to their work.
Wednesday 2:30pm - 2:55pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Production-Quality, Final-Frame Rendering on the GPU, Rob Slater (Redshift) (video)
Description: Learn about the latest features of Redshift, an NVIDIA GPU-Accelerated renderer that is redefining the industry's perception of GPU final-frame rendering. This talk is aimed at industry professionals and software developers who want to learn more about GPU-Accelerated production-quality rendering.
Wednesday 3pm - 3:25pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Physically Accurate Real-Time Ray Tracing for Automotive Visualization, Lukas Faeth (Autodesk)
Description: Autodesk VRED is the standard software for visualization in the automotive industry. To visualize, evaluate, and showcase digital car prototypes rendering needs to be highly accurate while fast and flexible enough to support design processes driven by rapid iteration. Lukas Faeth, Product Manager for Automotive Visualization at Autodesk, will talk about why those aspects are critical to their customer`s success and how the new NVIDIA Turing technology helped them to overcome a long-standing technical barrier.
Wednesday 4pm - 4:25pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Latest RTX Advances in V-Ray GPU, Phil Miller (Chaos) (video)
Description: The most fully featured GPU renderer, V-Ray GPU, will show its latest results in supporting RT Cores within RTX GPUs, as well as its upcoming support for out of-core for both textures and geometry. The latest and production features in V-Ray Next for Maya and its upcoming progress in V-Ray GPU will also be discussed.
Wednesday 4:30pm - 4:55pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Pure Ray Tracing in Real-Time with Project Lavina, Phil Miller (Chaos) (video)
Description: The latest advances in Project Lavina – the first renderer designed specifically for RTX hardware – will be demonstrated and its use of DXR will be explained. This cutting-edge research shows how full scenes from any V-Ray enabled tool can be viewed and combined with no additional authoring in a fully ray traced, real-time environment that is free of any compromises from rasterization.
Wednesday 5:30pm - 5:55pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: MPC Genesis: Real-Time Raytracing in Virtual Production, Francesco Giordana (MPC Film) Phil Miller (Chaos) (video)
Description: Join Francesco Giordana, MPC Film’s Realtime Software Architect on this talk about Genesis, MPC's virtual production platform. MPC Genesis has been designed as a robust multi-user distributed system that incorporates both modern technologies like mixed reality and more traditional techniques like motion capture and camera operation via encoded hardware devices. Francesco will talk about how MPC is improving the quality of the real-time graphics, with a special attention to lighting. He will explain how they started incorporating elements of real-time ray tracing into the platform, from a live link to Renderman XPU and MPC’s own OptiX-based path tracer, as well as a hybrid approach based on DXR running inside Unity.
Wednesday 5:30pm - 6pm, SIGGRAPH bookseller, outside Room 403, Book Signing: Ray Tracing Gems
Description:
Meet some of the authors and editors of the book Ray Tracing Gems.
Thursday 10:30am - 10:55am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: Production GPU Rendering for Captain Marvel, Hanzhi Tang (Digital Domain)
Description: Digital Domain used GPU rendering for the first time for final production renders on Captain Marvel. Join Hanzhi Tang as he walks though the shots and sequences and talks about the speed and benefits of GPU path tracing.
Thursday 11:30am - 11:55am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: RTX, a breakthrough in VFX and animation workflow, Jean-Colas Prunier (PocketStudio) (video)
Description: PocketStudio is a next generation collaborative edition tool to create 3D animated feature film. This talk will present how this tool revealed at Siggraph 2018 and now in beta, heavily relies on NVIDIA RTX technology to bring real-time GPU ray tracing in an easy-to-use interface for professionals, detailing how existing studios in deployment leverages it in their workflow. Entirely built from the ground up for film artists, it would not serve its purpose of lightspeed professional grade rendering without hardware ray tracing made available in NVIDIA Turing boards.
Thursday noon - 12:25pm, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: The Diminishing Need For Offline Rendering: Building Real Time Projects for Both Design and Marketing with RTX, Stephen Phillips (Theia) (video, slides)
Description: The quality gap between real time and offline rendering is narrowing thanks to RTX technology. Modern workflows can allow both VR design review sessions and final marketing renders to come from the same source files without an extra team of artists and redundant software licenses. In this Unreal Engine project breakdown with Theia Interactive, you'll get advanced tips and tricks for planning and executing this efficient new method of delivering the highest quality work for every customer need.
Thursday 2pm - 3:30pm, Room 150/151, SIGGRAPH Technical Papers: Machine Learning for Rendering
Papers:
Thursday 3:45pm - 5:15pm, Room 153, SIGGRAPH Course: RTX Accelerated Ray Tracing With OptiX, Ingo Wald, Steven G. Parker (NVIDIA) (code, slidesets)
Description:
This course is aimed at programmers interested in using OptiX to write RTX accelerated ray tracing applications. It will start with the general concepts behind the OptiX API, and then build up to more advanced topics such as how to properly use, and optimize for, the hardware ray tracing cores of modern GPUs. (NVIDIA event page)
Thursday 3:45pm - 5:15pm, Room 403AB, SIGGRAPH Talks: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - Processing Visuals
Four talks: