Ray traced Gaming? soon!

[Aegis]

I was wandering through Slashdot the other night and stumbled across an article about Ray Tracing in games ( PC Perspective - Ray Tracing and Gaming - One Year Later ) needless to say I was interested, HAVE been since the days of KPT Bryce and Ray Dream Studio. I really didn't think we'd ever see this level of rendering in games, given both Bryce and RDS could take minutes to render one frame.. granted that was on hardware from 1994-97. The thing I wasn't aware of, was that they can also use the graphical engine to control collision detection within games (pet hatred of games for a long time for me). Anyway the article above is a follow-on from the this one the author wrote a year ago: PC Perspective - Ray Tracing and Gaming - Quake 4: Ray Traced Project

I had a wander round Google's offerings though, and came across this site: Ray Tracing based Computer Games: Project Home where they have tech demos for stuff using the engine developed by that Daniel Pohl guy from the above articles. Cool to see the GTA Vice City map rendered in its entirety with no fog from that engine.

sooooooo who wants to give me their spare 8800GT video card now that they're no-longer needed? =)

[BrAiN DaNcE]

If your into ray tracing, have you checked out Pov-Ray, awesome little rendering engine, and free too :P

Nifty pics here: POV-Ray Hall of Fame

Also, random factoid, the movie Ice age, was fully rendered using ray-tracing.

[Aegis]

Yah, POV-ray's been around a long time, and you'll find most practically any CG movie is ray traced, almost all hollywood effects shots are ray traced as well due to high degree of accuracy between frames.

[BrAiN DaNcE]

pre ice age, they weren't done raytraced, just traditional raster rendering

[Aegis]

pretty sure toy story and bugs life were ray traced

[BrAiN DaNcE]

If memory serves, the models were ray traced, but the backrounds and props were not.

Ice age was the first fully ray traced movie.

I'll see if I can dig up some dirt :P

Edit: found some

While RT gives better results than PSC, we can often get acceptable results with PSC through the use of techniques such as environment mapping and the use of lots and lots and lots of tiny polygons. The special effects industry still dithers over whether to jump in and use RT. Many special effects are done using PSC, with maybe a bit of RT for special things (giving a hybrid RT/PSC algorithm). Toy Story, for example, used Pixar's proprietary PSC algorithm. It still took between 1 and 3 hours to render each frame (although you must remember that these frames have a resolution of about 6,000 by 4,000 pixels).

1A) Ray tracing versus polygon scan conversion

PSC = Polygon Scan Conversion, which is the way most graphics cards work.

[Aegis]

ahh yeah, duh, always forget there were a lot of times where the characters were rendered seperately.

[Aegis]

coolness - from slashdot - intel demos the raytraced ET:Quake Wars...

TG Daily - Intel converts ET: Quake Wars to ray-tracing

obviously still needs work, but man, they're really starting to get that engine moving.