Monthly Archives: September 2018

Best Birthday Evar

This last week I’ve been working a bit on stuffing Sphereflake into Chris Wyman’s sphere intersection demo for DXR. See my gallery of real-time ray tracing experiments for eye candy, statistics, and commentary.

This is my first DXR program (really, just a modification of Chris’s), and two things impressed me:

Sheer speed and size of what can be rendered in real-time now vs. 32 years ago: 60 FPS vs. 60+ minutes per frame (~216Kx speedup there alone), 48 million spheres vs. 7k spheres, 1920 x 1110 vs. 512 x 512. And this is on a currently-available GPU that will be considerably surpassed in ten days with the release of the GTX 2080ti and friends.
Programmability: add depth of field? Just jitter the eye ray’s origin. Want soft shadows? Jitter the shadow ray directions. Adding soft shadows took me about 15 minutes this morning, as a birthday treat to myself.

In all fairness, depth of field and soft shadows and whatnot are noisy, since I initially cast a single ray per pixel. I don’t use denoising, which is something that’s critical for acceptable real-time ray tracing performance whenever such effects are used. The images I show are what I see after a minute (or whenever I happened to do the screen capture; after a few seconds things usually looked good).

All that said, playing with the renderer is a lot of fun now. Add some path tracer functionality here or there and you have a new effect – no hours of hacky “rasterize and then do some funky post-processing effects.” I see this as a huge boon to CAD and pre-visualization packages that want to quickly add new effects or have users rapidly try out variants. It’s dangerously addictive, as I now want to add glossy reflection…

It Takes a Village…

It clearly takes a village to write the book Real-Time Rendering. Ola Olsson pointed out this entertaining bit on Google Scholar:

The fourth edition appears to be Volume 19 Issue 2. The article mentioned does exist, but is the very last reference in the book (#1978). The number of authors on the paper is impressive, quite an increase from the original three for this article. Ansel Adams, among others, gets listed three times as an author – excellent CV padding. My favorite, though, is the description of the article, a quote by Billy Zelsnack used at the beginning of our chapter “The Future.”

I poked around a bit more and found some alternate reality listings, such as this:

In both 4th editions our new three authors don’t show up. More disturbing is that in one universe’s edition Tomas Akenine-Möller also no longer exists (sad, since he’s listed six times as an author in the first image). And a strange universe it is, where the book has 40 citations, despite being out for less than 6 weeks. The prescience of some authors citing it is impressive, with one article published in the year 2000 referencing this fourth edition. Research must be wonderfully accelerated there, with developers being able to read about future breakthroughs that they can then write up.

Ray Tracing Monday, Again

I enjoyed the previous ray tracing monday two weeks ago, so let’s do it again.

Since it’s been two weeks, two resources:

“Real-Time Ray Tracing” – this is a free chapter (number 26) of Real-Time Rendering that we just finished and is free for download. 46 pages with a focus on DXR, but also including a detour through everyone’s favorite topic, spatial data structures for efficient ray tracing. Tomas, Angelo, and Seb did the heavy lifting on this one over the past 3 months, I helped edit and added bits where I could.
Ray Tracing Resources Page – along the way we ran across lots of resources. With the chapter finished as of today, I was inspired to make a page of links, mostly things I don’t want to lose track of myself or found of historical interest. Please do feel free to send me awesome resources to add, etc.

One entertaining thing I ran across was an image in the gallery for Chunky, a quite-good custom path tracer for Minecraft worlds:

Cornell blox