Beyond Radiosity: The Light of Mies van der Rohe

Author: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/

This animation demonstrates how global illumination using photon mapping can be used to explore the light flow in a complex architectural model: the unbuilt "Courtyard House with Curved Elements" by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The animation was rendered on a Linux based cluster using the DALI renderer.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• global
• illumination
• radiosity
• raytrace
• animation
• light
• render
• 3d
• graphics
• stanford
• Henrik
• Wann
• Jensen

[saiserieht]

No way rasterizers will ever look that good! Raytracing is the future.

[saivert]

the key to realism is lighting. animators have known this for a long time. Doesn't matter if the textures, polygons and all that looks good if the lighting is the one to spoil it all. We humans unconsciously spot tiny differences and small things. It's the same with faces. "uncanny valley" anyone?

[d3tach3d]

now get this in real time...

[vapourmile]

@saiserieht 100% Bollocks. I'm sick of listening to amateurs propagating rubbish like this: 1. From a realism stand-point there is very little to no advantage in using ray-tracing except for scenes which depend on multiple reflections and refraction which, in the real world, is almost nothing. Seriously, take a look around you: Book covers, table tops. Unless you have a mirror near by there is very little that requires ray-tracing for realism...

[MrLokification]

we need this to be in real time in an engine like Source

[qborg69]

If you have unlimited computing power ray tracing will produce superior results. But for most applications you have limited memory and processing power and in that case rasterization produces better quality pictures. Even Pixar uses a kind of rasterization for most of its frames.

[rouncer81]

@saiserieht rasterers will always be up raytracings ass tho, the computation winds up about the same in the end.

[VectrexForEver]

@holmesfutrell Ofcourse global illumination renderers use raytracing, I was talking about basic raytracing without indirect lighting, some people are hyping realtime versions of that up as the best graphics ever. Sure realtime global illumination solutions are using tricks to give approximations, but they can get quite close and are constantly improving as graphics cards get more powerful.

[holmesfutrell]

@VectrexForEver: No, Raytracing is not the past. The "global illumination" done under rasterization is usually cheap hacks. Rasterization has a lot of speed advantages, but is a less flexible algorithm. All modern high quality renderers use stochastic raytracing for global illumination.

[q009q009]

@Nimise08 thats already possibble in realtime

[q009q009]

looks like "RealLife" on DirectX 9999999999