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Author Topic: Interactive Indirect Illumination  (Read 4311 times)

Member1191

    Reputation: 2
Interactive Indirect Illumination
« on: January 12, 2012, 01:09:33 pm »
January 12, 2012, 01:09:33 pm
Thought i'd share this...
Here's a very interesting interview with Cyril Crassin about his technique of Interactive Indirect
Illumination (sorta GI).



The original article is in french:
http://www.3dvf.com/dossier-835-1-interview-cyril-crassin.html

Google English translation:
http://bit.ly/ACnyWt

Re: Interactive Indirect Illumination
« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2012, 01:51:12 pm »
January 12, 2012, 01:51:12 pm
Really amazing! For Lumion scenes it will probably have a huge impact on memory usage. Fortunately GPU's with massive memory amounts will be much easier to fabricate than creating GPU with a lot more processing power. If they would enhance the hardware for more easy dynamic voxilization of the geometry this might be very well the future of real-time rendering.

Member1191

    Reputation: 2
Re: Interactive Indirect Illumination
« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2012, 07:47:18 pm »
January 12, 2012, 07:47:18 pm
yes indeed!... i hope Lumion evolves to this level of illumination!
It certainly is going in the right direction  :D

Member21144

    Reputation: 3
Re: Interactive Indirect Illumination
« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2012, 10:50:01 pm »
January 12, 2012, 10:50:01 pm
I don't hesitate if Lumion required super hardware spec to enable functions to achieve this realistic level. GPU techs advance so fast and keep raising the bar every year anyway. Seem we like working in real-time that much!

I really waiting for the time we can omit resource hungry cpu rendering, and almost impossible for long animations without bankruptcy. GPU are the future for sure :)

Thanks,
Ming

Member1739

    Reputation: 32
Re: Interactive Indirect Illumination
« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2012, 11:26:50 pm »
January 12, 2012, 11:26:50 pm











Re: Interactive Indirect Illumination
« Reply #5 on: January 13, 2012, 11:03:18 am »
January 13, 2012, 11:03:18 am
I don't hesitate if Lumion required super hardware spec to enable functions to achieve this realistic level. GPU techs advance so fast and keep raising the bar every year anyway. Seem we like working in real-time that much!

I really waiting for the time we can omit resource hungry cpu rendering, and almost impossible for long animations without bankruptcy. GPU are the future for sure :)

Thanks,
Ming

The way I see it is that Voxel cone tracing seems like a much more viable solution than normal ray tracing. It's accurate enough for most games and it has several benefits over normal ray tracing. First of all I can imagine generating the geometry tree is a lot easier than the method used by regular raytracers. This is even more the case if hardware could be optimized for it. I can imagine that future hardware would quickly be able to render a 3D mesh to a voxel volume and it could have specialized hardware for generating the downsampled levels. In a gaming console a special buffer could be created to hold the voxels. The voxel memory can have a much lower speed than the memory used for rendering and textures. In the xbox the created a special memory section for high speed AA operations so it's not so far fetched. Ideally a new voxel topology is possible which accommodates for empty space so you only use memory when a voxel is filled. If one voxel has a color and normal it contains around 24 bytes. If we wanted a voxel model which covers a 1km by 1 km area with an height of 100m and a resolution of 1cm this way we would need 2183 TB so there's still a long way to go. If we decide 10cm resolution is enough for lighting and we only voxelize a building of 100mx100mx100m this number is reduced to around 24 GB. Who knows? Maybe we'll laugh at those numbers in 10 years. When I started computing my computer had 0.5 MB of memory and now it has 12GB!


Re: Interactive Indirect Illumination
« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2012, 08:09:17 pm »
January 13, 2012, 08:09:17 pm
If we decide 10cm resolution is enough for lighting and we only voxelize a building of 100mx100mx100m this number is reduced to around 24 GB. Who knows? Maybe we'll laugh at those numbers in 10 years.
We probably will :)
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/emerging-tech/2012/01/13/ibm-stores-one-bit-of-data-using-12-atoms-40094808/
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Re: Interactive Indirect Illumination
« Reply #7 on: January 16, 2012, 03:31:02 pm »
January 16, 2012, 03:31:02 pm
They are using a sparse voxel tree so only those voxels which contain something actually take up space. My calculations were are a bit exaggerated (a lot actually :D) Still, it will use a lot of memory and I think this limitation will be overcome in the future.

Member21144

    Reputation: 3
Re: Interactive Indirect Illumination
« Reply #8 on: January 17, 2012, 06:11:29 am »
January 17, 2012, 06:11:29 am
Remko,

Thanks for your infos. It really give me hope, 24GB seem possible within a few years.
But for 2183 TB ouch! We need improvements, so we need just 1/1000 means 2 TB ... still too much! ... ha ha  :o

And 100mx100mx16m, which suitable for most private residential projects, may required 1/6 which is about 4GB right ? Could we just don't use cube ?  Could we use a few cards combined ?

That can be done already! Dont' know how 10cm resolution would look anyway! :-D :-D :-D

Thanks,
Ming