Cycles, a new unbiased CPU/GPU renderer for Blender

The GPU path tracing virus keeps spreading at an incredible rate: Blender is soon going to have a fully integrated physically based renderer, codenamed 'Cycles', which can use the CPU or the GPU for rendering (GPU path tracing starts at 1:18).

http://code.blender.org/index.php/2011/04/modernizing-shading-and-rendering/

Changing materials, moving objects around and adding/deleting new objects can be done in real-time and the Cycles rendering engine can also rebuild the acceleration structure of the Suzanne model at lightning fast speeds. The source code will be available in about two weeks! It's going to be really cool when you can modify your model and immediately see the changes rendered in real-time in photoreal quality. Speaking of real-time editing and rendering, one of Luxrender's developers has made an utterly amazing video showing live editing of a physics simulation inside Blender and rendering it in real-time with Luxrender's PathGPU2 (a 100% OpenCL path tracer and part of SmallLuxGPU v1.8 with a heavy focus on animation rendering):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSQoJW9ajmU (real-time part starts at 1:23)

The video was rendered on a Core i7 920 + 2x ATI HD4890's, certainly not a bad system, but the HD4000 series was not exactly conceived with OpenCL computing in mind. I would love to see a GTX580 rendering this scene though. According to the graph below from Anandtech depicting the performance of SmallLuxGPU 1.7, I can imagine that card would just fly in this scene and make the video that much more awesome!

Update: SmallLuxGPU 1.8beta (which incorporates Metropolis light transport in OpenCL) is now available for download from the Luxrender forum

Update2: A lot of useful information and implementation details on the Cycles renderer can be found on http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Cycles under the header "Design"

Incredible real-time GPU path tracer using WebGL

Yesterday I came across another awesome GPU renderer (made by Evan Wallace), it's a very neat and extremely fast path tracer using GLSL shaders running in the browser:

http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/

A WebGL-enabled browser is required to run this (I highly recommend the latest Chrome build from http://www.khronos.org/webg/wiki/Getting_a_WebGL_Implementation#Chrome.2FChromium (the Chrome Canary build works great if you're on Windows, Firefox 4.0 crashes and other Chrome versions didn't work for me, it just keeps loading).

It's great fun to edit the scene: move the light or objects and see soft shadows being cast in real-time (60 fps) on the walls and other objects. You can also change materials and add extra objects. It renders blazingly fast even on very low end GPUs. Very impressive!

Source code for the path tracer:

view-source:http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/

There's also a GLSL version (Mac OS X):

http://www.madebyevan.com/glsl-path-tracing/

With this technology, a path traced physics simulation like the one in this video is perfectly possible in real-time on a current GPU. Or maybe a real-time path traced version of Tetris ;)

CentiLeo: a brand new interactive out-of-core CUDA path tracer for massive models

Wow, the real-time GPU path tracing goodness just keeps on coming! I've barely recovered from the fantastic real-time path traced Kajiya scene by Jacco Bikker and Jeroen van Schijndel, and now I stumbled upon another hugely impressive interactive GPU path tracer, called CentiLeo, which is able to render massive models (such as a stripped down Boeing 777 model containing 370 million polygons) interactively with global illumination on just 1 GTX 480 using out-of-core GPU path tracing (3-10 frames per second at 1024x768, 1 sample per pixel with 1 GI bounce from an HDR image).

A twelve-minute video in HD of this amazing renderer in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxx9dyPO0js

Some screengrabs of the video with more info:

The planned features sound extremely exciting and seem to be aimed at production rendering with among other things bidirectional path tracing, Metropolis light transport, hair and displacement mapping:

All these features will be CUDA based according to the author of the video (see youtube comments):

"the target is CUDA implementation because it is fast and flexible enough. BDPT, MLT, tesselation, displacement mapping, hair/fur, texture filtering - sure, will be CUDA-based.

Programmable materials can be done in CUDA. But an additional idea would be to port some existing CPU/C++ material shaders to work with our GPU compute building blocks. Voxels are not yet planned. But they can be potentially implemented.

Our goal is to finish the TODO feature list by September 2011. The concepts are pretty simple, but all the devil is in details. The future work is engineering. Almost all research was already done.

The website will be created this or next week. This demo shows what we can do now."

The holy grail for game graphics:

This tech would be an ideal fit for rendering huge voxel data sets stored in a sparse voxel octree at interactive rates with high-quality global illumination. Definitely something to keep an eye on in the future.

Scene from Kajiya's paper 'The rendering equation' can now be path traced in real-time on the GPU! UPDATE: exe available

This is just incredible, another milestone in the history of rendering! Jacco Bikker, the main developer behind the real-time path tracer Brigade, and Jeroen van Schijndel, an IGAD research assistant, have made a new simple but superb path tracer (similar to tokaspt) which can render the classic path tracing scene from the 1986 paper "The rendering equation" by Jim Kajiya in real-time on just one GTX 470! There is very little noise overall, there's just some in the glass spheres and in the shadowed caustics.

Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHWxsUUataw

Some stats:

- 512x512 rendering resolution

- 8 bounces

- 64 samples per pixel

- 12 frames/second on 1 GTX470

The amazing path tracing speed is partly due to the fact that there are no triangle meshes but only geometric primitives (spheres and boxes) in this scene, which are computationally much cheaper to intersect than triangles. The scene in the video is not 100 % identical to the original one (the structure consisting of the revolved parabola with the oblate spheroid, 'mushroom' for short ;-), is missing), but they're working on it (UPDATE 2: the mushroom is finished, see link at the end of this post). This is the original scene from the 1986 paper:

The above is an off-screen photograph (published in the paper). This is the direct feed image:

It's really mind-boggling when you realize that Kajiya needed 1221 minutes (20.35 hours) to render this image on a supercomputer from 1986 (an IBM 3081 mainframe) and 25 years later it can be computed at the same resolution in 36 milliseconds on a GTX580! A speed up of 2 million times!! Sounds like a great 25th anniversary :D !

(gotta love that '80ies font :-)

I would love to see some animation in this scene, for example an animated light casting moving shadows or a collapse of the pile of green spheres, which would greatly accentuate the "real-timeness" of the path tracing.

UPDATE: Executable and source code for this demo are now available at the links in this thread on the ompf forum. It's awesome, I'm getting a frametime of 1900ms in the 64 spp version on my poor 8600M GT, which is 49x slower than a GTX580 in this demo (kajiya-perf, default view at 64 spp/frame needs 1759 ms/frame on my 8600M GT and only 36 ms/frame on a GTX580)! Time to upgrade :)

UPDATE 2: Like Jacco Bikker has promised in the comments, the mushroom-like structure is now done! Visit http://ompf.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3174 for a screenshot of the updated scene and for more info on this project.

GPU Metropolis light transport with OpenCL in LuxRender!

This is very neat: after Dietger van Antwerpen successfully implemented Metropolis light transport (MLT) on the GPU using CUDA and the Brigade path tracer framework, one of the LuxRender developers now has succeeded at making MLT work on the GPU with OpenCL.

http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=5795 (registration required)

Unlike Luxrender's SmallLuxGPU, which is a hybrid CPU+GPU renderer that only uses the GPU for ray intersections, this MLT algorithm is running entirely on the GPU using OpenCL, offering a vast speed boost over the hybrid approach. Fireflies (bright pixels produced by caustics) are sampled away much more efficiently than when using the standard path tracing integrator. Very complex lighting situations (e.g. light passing through a keyhole) should benefit as well.

It's great to see a smart and efficient rendering algorithm like MLT (which many believed to be impossible on current GPUs) is now popping up in several GPU renderers. Hopefully bidirectional path tracing running entirely on the GPU (with MLT on top, something that has already been done by Dietger van Antwerpen) will become widespread soon as well.