Realtime raytracing for Unity

[Ihno]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG7DDXwYpD0
Impressive!
How is project Lavina going? Looking forward for updates.

[Jeffrey]

Yeah, realtime tech is taking over.
Autodesk already partnering with Unity...

[super gnu]

Yeah, realtime tech is taking over.
Autodesk already partnering with Unity...

anything you can do in realtime can be done better when you dont have to render it in 1/60th of a second... i predict a long life for offline rendering solutions.

[Jeffrey]

Don't think of it as a game. Realtime tech, as shown here, can be utilized to accelerate rendering:
"The CG car is rendered in Unity at 4K interactive frame rates, using the power of ray tracing in HDRP on NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti."

They don't mention running it @60 fps, just interactive framerates in order to achieve the offline output quality including layers etc.
To some extent, this probably can be compared to project Lavina.

[Ihno]

Of course offline will stay for a while. But at some point raytracing will become standard for games and other real time applications. And it will remove alot of the polycount restrictions those things come with currently.
For none ultra-high quality renderings, it will be enough. We have plenty of clients who would be happy with that quality.
Having that said I hope to render in realtime or at least at "interactive framerates" in vray then.

[super gnu]

yeah i just think the whole idea of "game engines taking over" is not realistic (imho)

possibly the game engines and offline renderers will meet in the middle somewhere, but the baggage that game engines bring, with all the complexity and compromises needed for realtime use, will get less and less relevant as computing power increases, and the "simpler" less compromised offline renderers will get closer to realtime use.

you will see game engines getting more like vray, and vray getting better at rendering fast.

I might be the only one, but if we are not talking about producing interactive content, why would i use a game engine.? id use a more powerful tool designed for the job which comes "without restrictions". being able to produce a final render in a few seconds at passable (but improving) quality, in a tool i have to jump through hoops to use, vs 10-30 minutes (but falling) at awesome quality with vray, with every tool designed for doing max quality stuff with many fewer compromises needed.

project lavinia is indeed interesting, for realtime stuff, and is a glimpse of the future im sure. however, if im doing an offline animation, or a still, id just be happy it rendered fast. if it could do an image in half a second, id end up adding cool stuff and cranking quality till it took half an hour anyway.

[Jeffrey]

The thing is the development teams of Unity and Epic (Unreal) are very big.
They do a lot of research. Also, did I mention Nvidia?
Autodesk (3dsmax) is falling behind bigtime.

Realtime tech is solving technical issues at a very rapid rate:
https://twitter.com/unity3d/status/1054922552391426049

[Ihno]

More details:
https://youtu.be/TY_krxdA5WY?t=9157
exiting stuff!

[AC5L4T3R]

I hate to say it but real time will be the standard in the next 5 years, maybe even less. In a way it's cool (everyones looked at a CGI film an said "imagine how good it will be when game graphics look like that") but it also means learning the likes of Unity or Unreal - which I something I don't really want to do. Ive worked with both in the past through college and university but the restrictions always put me off. I guess the closer we get to getting rid of those restrictions the better.

[oglu]

Redshift and Chaosgroup both are workig on realtime solutions dont worry.

[super gnu]

the way i see it, game engines have been designed from the ground up to deliver the fastest rendering possible, using every hack in the book to get acceptable quality at interactive framerates. the price you pay is in complexity of setup/prep.



( sound familiar? vray and every other offline rendering engine was/is doing similar things.. however due to the more relaxed rendertime requirements and rapidly increasing computer power, vray is now (yay!) at a stage where setup and optimisation has been reduced to a minimum.)


as computing power increases, game engines are adding more of the features found in offline engines, but still, with a massive focus on speed,at the price of limitations/ complex setup, non physically correct behaviour and imperfect results.


on the flipside, offline engines such as vray are introducing interactive rendering modes, which (currently) lack the high framerates, but benefit from robust physically correct behaviour, massive scene complexity, and relatively speaking, simple setup and tolerance of imperfect geometry etc.

given a future increase in rendering power, so vray or lavinia can produce 60fps 4k renders..which would you choose?

as i said, i expect the two approaches to meet in the middle. but given the techniques already used in vray are robust and easy to use, and require only increased computing power, versus the game engines gradually replacing their faked/optimised versions with the same tech that vray/lavinia already posses.... id go for something closer to lavinia/vray as the end result.

[Jeffrey]

Traditional game engines have a different pipeline (rasterization) compared to offline (raytrace)renderers.
Ray Tracing is praised for its physical accurate representation abilities.

We're seeing game engines moving to ray tracing / path tracing in order to achieve the holy grail of rendering, in real time.
There are many offline renderers being biased and / or using denoisers. If you want absolute accuracy with no hacks, by all means go brute force.
In the end we're just talking about transforming triangles to nice pixels. The faster, the better.

[VelvetElvis]

Hang on, let me pick up my thousands of dollars of GPUs from the GPU tree that grows out in my yard. Offline rendering will be here for many more years to come. A car being raytraced isn't the same as a full blown data set from Revit being raytraced at 60fps. Not even a full video game level that has had hundreds of people work on it for years is the same as one Arch I doing Revit for 2 weeks and then wondering why their model is a hellscape of flashing coplaner faces.

Weren't we all supposed to be living in a VR utopia by now anyways?