X3 Reunion graphics again. This time raytraced.

[Hades]

After some time without coding, I've started working on a raytracer again.
ATM it's just a pile of unorganized procedures, but at least it is starting to create recognizable pictures.





Features:

10k+ triangles
diffuse texture
light texture
specular texture
bilinear filtering
acceleration structure (BIH) is rebuild every frame
4-5 fps


Ok, that's several hundred times slower than my rasterized version, but at least it has self shadowing and that nice feeling, that every point on screen is calculated by my code, not by some API + GPU.

[rsts]

Looks pretty nice to me.

[Hades]

Thanks.

[THCM]

Looks good! How fast is your computer and is your renderer multithreaded?

[Hades]

Thanks!

It's an Athlon X2 @2,6 GHz

The code is partly multithreaded, but only uses 80% CPU time ATM.
The only part really optimized is the ray traversal and the ray/triangle intersection code, but it's mono ray, FPU only.
With SSE, packet tracing, first hit and shadow ray optimization and all those other little optimizations a 5 - 10 fold speed increase should still be possible.

[dracflamloc]

Thats pretty awesome

[Kaeru Gaman]

nice textures.
how many polygons does the model have?
200ms is pretty fast for raytracing, but maybe not fast enough for ingame-grafix....

[DarkDragon]

nice textures.
how many polygons does the model have?
200ms is pretty fast for raytracing, but maybe not fast enough for ingame-grafix....

Polycount: 10k+ (As he said)
Afaik you know, raytracing is not for ingame (maybe in the future).

[Kaeru Gaman]

> Polycount: 10k+ (As he said)

he said:
> Features:
> 10k+ triangles
I interpreted that as naming the possibilities of the engine, not stating how much triangles that model has that needs ~200ms to render.

> Afaik you know, raytracing is not for ingame
posting such threads implies trying to make it usable for ingame-grafix.

what's up Didi? did I sit on your tie?

[thefool]

That looks really nice! with some optimizations you could get a damn decent speed

[Hades]

Cool down, people. My first post wasn't that clear.

The model is made of 11302 triangles. I've already had 700k+ triangles on screen. That's only slightly slower (about half the fps? Not sure. Edit: Only without rebuilding the BIH in both cases)

Even with that 10 fold speed increase it would be to slow for a game.
Resolution is only 600x400.
@800x600 with a closeup of the model I am already down to 1 fps now.
But hopefully I'll have a PC with 8 cores at the end of the year...

[thefool]

It is certainly fast enough for movie rendering

[DarkDragon]

> Polycount: 10k+ (As he said)

he said:
> Features:
> 10k+ triangles
I interpreted that as naming the possibilities of the engine, not stating how much triangles that model has that needs ~200ms to render.

> Afaik you know, raytracing is not for ingame
posting such threads implies trying to make it usable for ingame-grafix.

what's up Didi? did I sit on your tie?

No, it was well meant. I just thought 10k+ was for the ship triangles.

>> Afaik you know, raytracing is not for ingame
>posting such threads implies trying to make it usable for ingame-grafix.

Hum, I think at the moment it's better to stay at quality with raytracers instead of performance.

[Hades]

Hum, I think at the moment it's better to stay at quality with raytracers instead of performance.

I'd like to have both.

[Kaeru Gaman]

...and it is a good approach for sure.

ingame-grafix can also mean a on-the-fly rendering of still pictures.

needing 1 second for a 800x600 picture would be fair enough to write an adventure that creates it's backgrounds at runtime.