Arauna2 announcement video

[jbikker]

Hi all,

I just uploaded two videos to YouTube of a new path tracing engine, titled 'Arauna2'. The Arauna2 path tracer is the successor to the Arauna real-time ray tracer, and has been built from the ground up. It uses CUDA for high-speed GPU-based path tracing, and uni-directional path tracing with extensive MIS and RIS for fast convergence, combined with the 'wavefront path tracing' algrorithm originally introduced by Dietger van Antwerpen. The shading path is still 'ubershader' style, with full Phong support (including glossy), pure specualars and dielectrics. Light may be emitted by surfaces or meshes, as well as point lights, spot lights (supporting IES profiles) and directional lights.

We (the NHTV University of Applied Sciences) are aiming this software primarily at real-time previews of architectural models, where instant previews of lighting is important.

Videos:




EDIT: Here's a link to the source video material (Warning: 850Mb): https://mega.co.nz/#!pgJQUJ4Z!XaJIW0B_B ... EpDbrVeNBk

A demo for CUDA-enabled devices will be available later this week. More info will follow.

- Jacco.

[fursund]

Awesome! Do you happen to have a non-youtube'ified version lying around. It's hard to see what is compression artifacts, and what is progressive rendering artifacts.

[jbikker]

Do you happen to have a non-youtube'ified version lying around. It's hard to see what is compression artifacts, and what is progressive rendering artifacts.

I uploaded the source material to mega.nz, see original post.

[davepermen]

looking much better on mega than youtube.. good work, looking very nice.

[toxie]

great (and kinda scary) work as usual!

[jbikker]

As promised, here's the demo:

https://mega.co.nz/#!UphmTTxb!JAfhjCfDa ... XPqZY8sZRs

Requirements:

* NVidia device (GTX470 or better);
* Windows 64-bit;
* Latest drivers.

Enjoy,

- Jacco.

[fursund]

Great. Thank you!

[Dade]

The shading path is still 'ubershader' style, with full Phong support (including glossy), pure specualars and dielectrics.

Interesting, I guess the "ubershader" way makes a lot of sense for GPU real-time path tracing.

[mpeterson]

first of all, great demo. long time no demo anymore here on ompf. some remarks though:
everything looks really blocky and diffuse upsampling ?). the lighting is flat. is there no hdr pipeline or
a strange tonemapper in place ? i am running here with dual titans and expected a little bit more quality.
but again, great to hear/see something new, mp.

[jbikker]

first of all, great demo. long time no demo anymore here on ompf. some remarks though:
everything looks really blocky and diffuse upsampling ?). the lighting is flat. is there no hdr pipeline or
a strange tonemapper in place ? i am running here with dual titans and expected a little bit more quality.
but again, great to hear/see something new, mp.

Is your output the same as the video?
The image is rendered to 640x400 and upsampled to 1280x800; this is to guarantee decent performance on low-end devices (such as my laptop). On two Titans, it runs very well at full res, as you can see in the video. Actually one Titan is fine as well.
What do you mean by 'the lighting is flat'? There's quite a bit you can do about the color balance if you hit F1, and play with brightness / contrast and the postprocessor (hit F3 to enable it).