There was a video about stadia and they were streaming the latest tomb raider game. From what I remember, they stated that they used a 15mb internet to do that and the playback was around 24-30 fps. That sounds acceptable for me. I also live in a third world country as you may know, but around here, people with ok amount of money can access from 500mb up to 2 gb internet. I know that this isn't accessible everywhere but 15 mb really doesn't sound that much to me. Also, consider this. Buying a next gan console would cost you a lot. But you are already paying some sort of an internet connection. Upgrading it to a higher speed one (if accessible) wouldn't really cost you much more on a long run than buying some next gen hardware which would get replaced eventually anyways. So I have big hopes in this. It would make a lot of sense.
I still feel consoles are better. My ps2 still works to this day and its something that I can keep because I own it and it brings back good memories. Having something internet based isn't something u can own. What about the games? I am not sure whether u can have an original copy of the games. I understand this is a move towards making things more streamlined but its still a limited idea because if one doesn't have much money, u can always save for a ps5 and use it forever till it breaks down i guess. U are right most services are moving towards internet based. U no longer need to worry about hardware. That is a big plus. So devs are no longer limited by hardware restrictions. I wonder what Playstation and Xbox execs think about this. But how would devs make money from this, share revenue with google? Or players pay a subscription fee for the stadia service and also pay for the game? I also gather it is linux based. No window users? and maybe ads running while u play games? I still prefer consoles or pc tbh.
And a still image with less noise. Epic should really update sequencer so it leaves so time for the ray tracing passes to converge. Or they should improve they ray tracing implementation, because currently there are a lot of noise even on high sample count. GI is the worst, its currently unusable in dark scenes, if you have camera movement. Also, a bunch of rendering features are simply not working with ray tracing.
Here is a list of current issues with ray tracing that I encountered during my experiments:
Volumetric fog: - Volumetric fog isn't visible in any ray tracing pass. - Ray traced shadows aren't working with volumetric fog, so when you have ray tracing shadows on, and you have volumetric fog in the scene, the fog doesn't have any shadowing, so light leaks through everything in the fog. - Volumetric fog isn't visible through ray traced translucency.
Translucency: - Ray traced translucency doesn't seem to have specular lighting. - Ray traced translucency doesn't have IOR control.
Skylight: - Ray traced skylight doesn't have bounce settings. - Ray traced skylight has a lot of light leaks for some reason, even when GI is on. I find it unusable in some cases when you are trying to light a mostly closed interior with small openings.
Reflections: - Sharp reflections gets a lot of noise when the sample count is high (which is needed for glossy reflections in order to reduce their noise). - Sorting order of multi bounce reflections seems to be off in some edge cases (mirror room). - Brightness of some things in the reflections seems to be off sometimes.
Global illumination: - Very noisy in interior scenes, when you are trying to light from outside through small windows, even on high sample count. I would call it unusable in the 50% of cases. - Exteriors works mostly ok. - Seems to have very weak to almost no effect in the aforementioned cases, even on high sample count and multiple bounces. - In the aforementioned cases, even slow camera movement causes very strong trails / ghosting.
Other rendering features: - Instanced static meshes including foliage doesn't support any ray tracing features currently. Supposedly it will be fixed in 4.23. - A lot of shading models isn't supported by ray tracing yet. - Displacement with tessellation and world position offset causes incorrect diffuse and specular lighting (They are not visible to the ray tracing).
With all that said, there are also things working nicely. For example, ray traced shadows, ambient occlusion, and reflections are working mostly nicely (unless you use displacement) and are totally usable, and I understand that this tech is experimental yet, and has a long way to go. I was able to render multiple scenes using ray tracing, with some workarounds and hacks, and I'm looking forward to see them improving over time.
Here is a list of current issues with ray tracing that I encountered during my experiments: ......
Very nice summary. I'm interested in playing around with ray tracing. After seeing the limitations you mentioned, might as well wait a little bit more for the issues to be fixed.
Hello @Pangahas, thanks for checking in. Its actually nothing magical. I just take the lighting, and apply a ramp with a few points on it. This gives me the main cell shading. Then I apply the diagonal lines on the shadowed pixels. There is also a subtle outline using the classic post process based method.
Did a collaboration with my friend and ex-colleague, Dejan Sljivic, who is an aspiring hard surface artist. Check out his work here: https://www.artstation.com/sljiva We took his last work, and I've put it in different settings and environments, and re-rendered it, using RTX in Unreal Engine. Ray traced soft shadows, skylight, global illumination, and reflections were used. The background assets are all from Megascans. Enjoy!
Did a collaboration with my friend and ex-colleague, Dejan Sljivic, who is an aspiring hard surface artist. Check out his work here: https://www.artstation.com/sljiva We took his last work, and I've put it in different settings and environments, and re-rendered it, using RTX in Unreal Engine. Ray traced soft shadows, skylight, global illumination, and reflections were used. The background assets are all from Megascans. Enjoy!
Magazine kind of shots:
Studio lighting shots:
Excellent stuff! Does rtx totally replaces the need for baked lighting?
@demigodssw - Hi. That really depends on your goals, but the way I use it in my projects, yes, it completely replaces it. Generally speaking, the more rtx features you enable, the more expensive it becomes. I usually enable all the features I could ray trace in my personal projects, so its usually reflections, shadows and gi, with usually more than 1 sample per pixel. This results in a framerate that is not acceptable in most games (around 30 fps) but I just want nice renders. However, there are more and more games coming out that features one or more rtx features, so I believe that multiple features at once will be totally playable in the next generation of rtx videocards.
Here is a performance example put on a 2080ti -> a moderately complex environment scene with a directional light with ray traced shadow (1 spp) and gi with 1 bounce enabled (1 spp again) could easily run on around 60 fps or more on 1080p resolution. Ray traced shadows turns out to be fairly cheap and barely affect fps even when you crank up the amount of samples. Reflections and gi can be more expensive, and when you use multiple bounces or multiple samples on them, the price of them can go up to the sky so generally its a good idea to keep these values as low as possible. Reflections can also fall back to reflection probes / ssr after a certain roughness threshold, so you can set rough surfaces to use the oldschool method to save some performance.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I will also be using RTX for my personal work. Seems like no more time will be wasted on baked lighting now. Thanks for the example too it will be useful for my next project.
Something a little different from my usual stuff. Ben Hale (Makkon) was posting about some stylized crystals he was working on his twitter earlier this year, and they were looking really cool. I needed something similar for one of the projects I'm working on, so I decided to try reverse engeneering it. I didn't do it the exact same way as he did, but the basics of it are the same. They use a height map input and a series of bump offset nodes to give illusion of depth and transparency, while it actually only uses an opaque blending mode. Its using only tiling textures. I think they turned out nicely and I like the results. Thanks to Ben for the breakdown images he posted.
Forgot to post this here. A few months ago, I worked on this test cinematic at Digic, where we were benchmarking an rtx quadro kindly provided to us by NVIDIA for a trial period. We were testing both artistic and technical aspects of the card. We did not use all of its memory, but having more than 11 gigs was nice. The project was rendered in Unreal Engine 4. As usually, I worked on fx, such as atmospherics and other stuff, some shaders and textures, and the birds flocking ai, and some more.
@WitchDev - Thats really cool, but this is my sketchbook thread and a general place for stuff I make using Unreal. Just mentioning because I'm not sure if you just wanted to inform me, or you thought this is like a waywo for Unreal. There is one like that one the very top of the unreal engine section, but its pretty much dead.
@ant1fact - No its done using a single texture. The slices are laid out like a flipbook. Its shown on the left side of the gif. This is a standard for handling volumetric data in Unreal for now.
Replies
U are right most services are moving towards internet based. U no longer need to worry about hardware. That is a big plus. So devs are no longer limited by hardware restrictions. I wonder what Playstation and Xbox execs think about this. But how would devs make money from this, share revenue with google? Or players pay a subscription fee for the stadia service and also pay for the game? I also gather it is linux based. No window users?
and maybe ads running while u play games?
I still prefer consoles or pc tbh.
Based on:
http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/index.php/2011/09/distance-estimated-3d-fractals-v-the-mandelbulb-different-de-approximations/
https://gum.co/Mandelbulb
* A Megascans asset was used.
The animation is procedural - simulated rigid bodies with forces auto-controlled through blueprints. I also used ray traced skylight and reflections.
And a still image with less noise. Epic should really update sequencer so it leaves so time for the ray tracing passes to converge. Or they should improve they ray tracing implementation, because currently there are a lot of noise even on high sample count. GI is the worst, its currently unusable in dark scenes, if you have camera movement. Also, a bunch of rendering features are simply not working with ray tracing.
Volumetric fog:
- Volumetric fog isn't visible in any ray tracing pass.
- Ray traced shadows aren't working with volumetric fog, so when you have ray tracing shadows on, and you have volumetric fog in the scene, the fog doesn't have any shadowing, so light leaks through everything in the fog.
- Volumetric fog isn't visible through ray traced translucency.
Translucency:
- Ray traced translucency doesn't seem to have specular lighting.
- Ray traced translucency doesn't have IOR control.
Skylight:
- Ray traced skylight doesn't have bounce settings.
- Ray traced skylight has a lot of light leaks for some reason, even when GI is on. I find it unusable in some cases when you are trying to light a mostly closed interior with small openings.
Reflections:
- Sharp reflections gets a lot of noise when the sample count is high (which is needed for glossy reflections in order to reduce their noise).
- Sorting order of multi bounce reflections seems to be off in some edge cases (mirror room).
- Brightness of some things in the reflections seems to be off sometimes.
Global illumination:
- Very noisy in interior scenes, when you are trying to light from outside through small windows, even on high sample count. I would call it unusable in the 50% of cases. - Exteriors works mostly ok.
- Seems to have very weak to almost no effect in the aforementioned cases, even on high sample count and multiple bounces.
- In the aforementioned cases, even slow camera movement causes very strong trails / ghosting.
Other rendering features:
- Instanced static meshes including foliage doesn't support any ray tracing features currently. Supposedly it will be fixed in 4.23.
- A lot of shading models isn't supported by ray tracing yet.
- Displacement with tessellation and world position offset causes incorrect diffuse and specular lighting (They are not visible to the ray tracing).
With all that said, there are also things working nicely. For example, ray traced shadows, ambient occlusion, and reflections are working mostly nicely (unless you use displacement) and are totally usable, and I understand that this tech is experimental yet, and has a long way to go. I was able to render multiple scenes using ray tracing, with some workarounds and hacks, and I'm looking forward to see them improving over time.
Scenes I made using ray tracing in Unreal Engine:
Sci fi hallway rtx relighting (GI,AO, reflections and shadows):
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/L2EAGR
Reflections torture test:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EV2AY8
Exterior lighting test 1 (GI, AO, skylight and shadows):
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QzLo48
Exterior lighting test2 (GI, AO, skylight and shadows):
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gJyVkE
Chernobyl series fan art scene (skylight and reflections):
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Vdkn9P
My tests in UE4 with Raytracing activated aren't yet conclusive...
In my previous foliage heavy rtx scenes, I used a custom procedural foliage volume with simple static meshes, because instances weren't supported.
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/WlSSzz
https://www.artstation.com/sljiva
We took his last work, and I've put it in different settings and environments, and re-rendered it, using RTX in Unreal Engine. Ray traced soft shadows, skylight, global illumination, and reflections were used. The background assets are all from Megascans.
Enjoy!
Magazine kind of shots:
Studio lighting shots:
Here is a performance example put on a 2080ti -> a moderately complex environment scene with a directional light with ray traced shadow (1 spp) and gi with 1 bounce enabled (1 spp again) could easily run on around 60 fps or more on 1080p resolution. Ray traced shadows turns out to be fairly cheap and barely affect fps even when you crank up the amount of samples. Reflections and gi can be more expensive, and when you use multiple bounces or multiple samples on them, the price of them can go up to the sky so generally its a good idea to keep these values as low as possible. Reflections can also fall back to reflection probes / ssr after a certain roughness threshold, so you can set rough surfaces to use the oldschool method to save some performance.
Kudos to the whole team, and Előd Somogyi especially.
https://www.artstation.com/elodakielod