Tessellation-free displacement for ray-tracing, Siggraph 2021

[viktor_szemes]

Sooo,

I've recently seen this study about a new approach to displacement for ray-tracing from Adobe, that claims the method does not need a pre-tessellated geometry for the displacement, supposedly making it extremely memory-efficient. So I would like to draw your attention to it in case you guys missed it.

Here is a youtube video that sums it up, it is worth to watch in full:
https://youtu.be/DTqcPEhSHB8

Here is a link for the Adobe article

And another link to the siggraph 2021 presentation

Now, is this something that chaos products could benefit from?
Did Chaos devs look into this?


Thanks,
Viktor

[matanov]

Hi Viktor,

We haven't missed it. It is a similar approach to our 2D displacement but a different implementation.

Last time I checked, our R&D team have in the list to see if it's better than what we already have.

Thanks for pinging

[caypiranha]

Hi Guys,

but that similar approach isn´t as modern as it is being mentioned here presented on Siggraph 2021, or?
I mean 2D Displ. is quite a long time present in Vray. And this kind of redeveloped technique here, I haven´t found in Vray so far - or did I miss something?: https://youtu.be/nY3TBmYYVKc?t=867

That´s anyway pretty impressive! =)

[vlado]

The implementation of Adobe is indeed novel, but in the end the results are exactly the same as the 2D displacement in V-Ray (and yes, 2D displacement has been there for nearly 20 years; just because the authors of the paper were not aware of it doesn't mean it didn't exist - it's really hard to keep track of everything that goes on in the field of computer graphics and it's really hard to think of anything radically new these days). It would be interesting to try and reimplement the 2D displacement using this technique to see if we get any kind of speed-up, but this will not change the final results.

Best regards,
Vlado

[caypiranha]

Thank you for this statement. I agree, that some or even many approaches are still pretty old on one Hand and never got into the mainstream because of the lack of computing power in past days.
Probably also special on the GPU side. Now, these books can be opened again, and may some think to sell this - also unconsciously - as "new".

In the case of Vray, it might be more interesting, what the future about this feature means to Vray RT etc. e.g.?

[vlado]

Well, we have 2D displacement working in V-Ray GPU since a while now. This new algorithm might speed it up, but the feature itself is already there.

Best regards,
Vlado