Displacement tests

[radiance]

Good explanation! Although these are not so good news hehehe I´ve seen the displacement video of Mach Studio Pro, I forgot that was on the GPU. The guys from MotivaCG are preparing something very similar on COLIMO, but they use CUDA! Maybe a light at the end of the tunel?

the issue is that micropolygon displacement is easy to do with z-buffer and scanline type renderers, eg non-raytracers.
they just sort, cull, transform and draw the polygons for every frame, and they dice up geometry to sub-pixel size while doing this.

raytracers on the other hand need to find geometry in a 3d structure (they need to find the closest triangle that intersects),
so this is much more complex, as they can fire rays into any possible direction.
There are techniques for doing this, and caching the results, but they are complicated and quite slow, and even on CPU's very difficult to implement, so adapting it to a GPU is a real nightmare.

Radiance

[Krisonrik]

Good explanation! Although these are not so good news hehehe I´ve seen the displacement video of Mach Studio Pro, I forgot that was on the GPU. The guys from MotivaCG are preparing something very similar on COLIMO, but they use CUDA! Maybe a light at the end of the tunel?

the issue is that micropolygon displacement is easy to do with z-buffer and scanline type renderers, eg non-raytracers.
they just sort, cull, transform and draw the polygons for every frame, and they dice up geometry to sub-pixel size while doing this.

raytracers on the other hand need to find geometry in a 3d structure (they need to find the closest triangle that intersects),
so this is much more complex, as they can fire rays into any possible direction.
There are techniques for doing this, and caching the results, but they are complicated and quite slow, and even on CPU's very difficult to implement, so adapting it to a GPU is a real nightmare.

Radiance

Can it make you scream and wake up in the middle of the night?