I'm fascinated by the possibilities of real-time ray tracing and so decided to look up how it works in Unreal Engine 4! During my search I came across this blog post about the current state and future of real-time ray tracing: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/technology-sneak-peek-advances-in-real-time-ray-tracing
The post talks about Epic Games, NVIDIA and Porsche's joint presentation at SIGGRAPH 2018 entitled "Speed of Light", in which real-time ray tracing is demonstrated in the rendering of a Porsche Speedster. When the scene is played back in real time it uses both raster and ray-trace techniques. First, a raster base pass of the scene is calculated, and then multiple ray-trace passes are launched. In order to keep the number of rays and samples to a minimum while still yielding a photorealistic image, NVIDIA's ray-tracing technology uses a technique called denoising - a sophisticated algorithm that takes many factors into account in order to reduce the variance between adjacent pixel colors. A good denoiser is absolutely crucial in making a renderer efficient and high-quality! You can read more about the specific details of real-time ray tracing in the article. Once this technology is fully developed, there will be no more need for complex lighting methods or raster rendering. Instead, lighting and reflections will all work off physical properties, and game and movie scenes will look beautiful all the time!
I'm fascinated by the possibilities of real-time ray tracing and so decided to look up how it works in Unreal Engine 4! During my search I came across this blog post about the current state and future of real-time ray tracing: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/technology-sneak-peek-advances-in-real-time-ray-tracing
The post talks about Epic Games, NVIDIA and Porsche's joint presentation at SIGGRAPH 2018 entitled "Speed of Light", in which real-time ray tracing is demonstrated in the rendering of a Porsche Speedster. When the scene is played back in real time it uses both raster and ray-trace techniques. First, a raster base pass of the scene is calculated, and then multiple ray-trace passes are launched. In order to keep the number of rays and samples to a minimum while still yielding a photorealistic image, NVIDIA's ray-tracing technology uses a technique called denoising - a sophisticated algorithm that takes many factors into account in order to reduce the variance between adjacent pixel colors. A good denoiser is absolutely crucial in making a renderer efficient and high-quality! You can read more about the specific details of real-time ray tracing in the article. Once this technology is fully developed, there will be no more need for complex lighting methods or raster rendering. Instead, lighting and reflections will all work off physical properties, and game and movie scenes will look beautiful all the time!