The Photo-Realism Challenge: Light

17 Responses

  1. Minimur12 says:

    Nice one Tstrauss, 😀 what’s next?!?

  2. Harski says:

    Thanks, I really love these article! You could’ve mentioned ray tracing though 😉

    • TStrauss says:

      Ray tracing is gorgeous, but falls into the “never gonna happen” category. I’ve seen some tech demos, but these are always running high end hardware and relatively simple scenes.

      • hgoel0974 says:

        I wouldn’t say never going to happen. These days high end hardware could easily play a raytraced game, and todays high-end is tomorrow’s low-end 😉

        • TStrauss says:

          The problem isn’t brute force power, it’s architecture and hardware acceleration. CUDA/ Compute cores are being used to do raytracing on GPUs today, but that isn’t hardware acceleration, it’s parallelization of tasks previously performed on the CPU.

          If some future GPU architecture sports a built in raytracing pipeline with proper hardware acceleration (it could happen I guess), it might happen. But given the current direction of 3D, rasterization is probably going to be around for the long haul.

      • Yuki says:

        Have you seen

        • Yuki says:

          *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLPAHHb8j20

          • jason says:

            There are some programs that use raytracers today, like keyshot. heck I built my own raytracer using c++. However it’s not practical for real time. It needs to render an image every frame. There’s a lot of noises in the engine (when use in real time). However I do think that at one point in our future, we’ll be having raytracer as our game engine. Nvidia’s CUDA cores seems to give us a glimpse of it.

          • TStrauss says:

            Yeah, that video is raytraced. I tried to run the executable on my computer to see if it was real time, but got some error. Looking through the comments, it appears that those who did get it to run did not enjoy a high framerate. Also, the geometry is very simple in this video. Imagine raytracing a human being.

            So, er, thanks for proving my point?

  3. JiachengWeng says:

    I think the light is the best as well as the most effective way to make vedio games more realistic. I also hope developers to find some way to simplify functions of creating shadows and ray effects so that those perfect effects can be completely used on portable devices like PSVita! Haha!

  4. ZacUAX says:

    It’s funny. Even though it’s less realistic, I much prefer the side of the picture without HDR on. I prefer bright, vibrant colors in my video games.

  5. foxman says:

    I dunno that much about game engines, but I did watch the 2013 GDC FoxEngine demo. I’m disappointed that it was not mentioned because a giant part of the FoxEngine segment was reflective surfaces, lighting effects, and so on. In fact, the trailer for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes was even redone in daytime to show the effect, during the conference. It’s on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17nje72VnPE . (FoxEngine GDC 2013 if the link fails). I just feel that it may be a significant detail to add, as it is supposed to be for current gen, running on PS3 spec hardware, though it will be multiplatform.

  6. gunblade says:

    what about photo shopping a bunch of 3d hd picture on a wire frame… 3d holograms..(coool 3d veiws but the color…)

  7. gunblade says:

    ooh on the lighting thing i guess it makes seens to now the differnts of light on a rock to light on a grass the grasss might give a little green glow throw the light that pass throw it wen a light on a rock would be more shiny if on like granite…

  8. gunblade says:

    like even that picture with the fire its would be more see tough lighting…

  9. svenn says:

    Why are voxel parts calculated @ CPU ? As far as I understand GPU is good at doing repetitive task that can be run in parallel, eg. rendering images. I ask cause you seem to know something about it 🙂 nice article;