What happened to BRIGADE? Tweet

[Rikk The Gaijin]

I was waiting to have exciting news about it after the SIGGRAPH, but everything is silent, and the Blog is not updated since January!
What's the status of it? I'm asking because I would really love to start doing some test with it, and show it to the people of my company.

[glimpse]

That's definitely an interesting topic!
looking forward for any news too =)..

[Seekerfinder]

Don't you know? We're already at version 3!

And since Ray Tracey is no longer around (pity, he seemed to bring a lot of experience and passion to the party), I would wonder who is heading up Brigade now? I remain excited about Brigade's prospect but after the hype of GTC, all we seem to have right now are rumours (and rumours of rumours).

It seems that there is a certain amount of overlap between Octane and Brigade. First we were told that Brigade and Octane are 'totally different' and would be used for different applications. Then we were told that Brigade and Octane were now sharing the same code-base, allowing Octane files to be rendered in realtime in Brigade (http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=38747). With cloud coming soon, is Brigade Otoy's Softimage? Too much overlap?

Where does Brigade fit into Otoy's roadmap? Will see a release anytime soon? I always thought it was logical for Brigade and Octane to somehow merge if that were possible. Is this where we're heading?

Would love to get more info on this!

Best,
Seeker

[riggles]

What happened to Sam?

[Rikk The Gaijin]

What happened to Sam?

Yeah, what happened?

[icelaglace]

We're still working on Brigade, don't worry Rikk.

[voon]

Can you tell me what brigade at the moment is supposed to be? As a newbie, without much knowledge of game engines, I have seen what Unreal4 and Cryengine 3.6 with PBR etc can do .... their videos are extremely impressive, but: They're not real time pathtracing ... it seems all videos show off static objects, with precalculated ("baked"?) lighting etc and only having to apply the moving persons shadow etc to the scene ... i.e. they look good, but they cheat.

Brigade seems to go fully calculated ... just real pathracing I guess?

But while the video is impressive, I guess at the moment, you would need 64 GPUs or whatever ot have fluid experiences demanded by games?

So what is it right now .... I assume an early project, designed to work with GPUs in like 15 years? I can't imagine such a realtime pathtracer to produce stable, noisefree imagey at 30+ FPS on a single GPU as with most gamers in the near future.

I assume it is also a tech experiment, to experiment with GPU tuning etc to eventually also let discoveries flow back into Octane etc?

[Rikk The Gaijin]

We're still working on Brigade, don't worry Rikk.

That's a relief!

But while the video is impressive, I guess at the moment, you would need 64 GPUs or whatever ot have fluid experiences demanded by games?

If I understood correctly, it seems like Brigade will take advantage of the Cloud power... I don't know how that will work, tho.

[icelaglace]

Brigade is meant to be real-time, for games / pre-vis, etc... while keeping the goodness of unbiased path tracing.

Unreal Engine can do both, it can do LPV (some kind of GI using SH) and baking. Baking is the most common option (see the latest works done with UE4 on archvis, very nice but it's a baked scene, so not much dynamic objects).

That's why games like Battlefield as they have fully destructible objects avoid baking (IIRC, they used Geometrics).
But for static scenes, baking is probably one of the best options.

The point of Brigade is having the quality of baked lightmaps but in real-time so you can move your objects, change the lighting... (You guys use Octane, I don't need to explain haha )

You don't need 64 GPUs to run Brigade, don't worry. The point of using the cloud is that anyone even if they have a terrible machine (Not everyone has 780ti's, especially normal gamers or architects) They still can use Brigade how it's meant to be.

Brigade 3 currently renders 720p@30fps on a single GPU (780, not TI).
And we're still refactoring some stuff there and there, so the performance is not even final...far from it. It'll be much faster soon.

Our main objective is the noise-free real-time rendering, we reduced the noise A LOT since I'm working on it, I can't judge too much about previous versions of Brigade, I'm working on it since Brigade 2.

Then all the ORBX workflow will be usable in Brigade too, Like you do your scene on Octane - you can render it on Brigade and vice versa.
For game devs, they shouldn't worry, there is enough CPU/MEM to do their game logic, sound, AI, physics, etc...

We'll give you guys updates about Brigade soon! Sorry about that lack of news, but no worries, it's actively being worked on.

Thanks.

[Rikk The Gaijin]

Just out of curiosity, I thought Sam Lapere was the creator of Brigade, and now he's "missing". What happened to him? (if it's ok to ask)