Very interesting read…
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=455
And it links to some interesting stuff too.
Note the intel screenshot full of spheres. Spheres are hard to do well in polygonal renderers and easy with ray tracers … but guess what, not many things are spherical.
I love the mirror-plated spider thing in one of the Intel demo screenshots. Sure, everything else in the scene (rendered on FOUR quad-core machines) looks like crap, but we can do a mirror-finished spider.
If/when real-time raytracing becomes commercially feasible, you can be 100% guaranteed that the first generation of raytraced titles will be completely crammed full with a highly unrealistic amount of mirror-reflective things. 
–Eric
ha ha ha hah a yeah.
we will be inundated with ray traced billiards.
It will be cool at first.
Anodized Aluminum or Chrome looking balls with a faint color hue.
The marble genre will re-release itslef.
When Unity supports RealTime RayTracing, I think I’ll make “Tin Foil Panic!”, a frenzied game where you wrap a bunch of food in a sheet of tin foil, ala Katamari.
Then I will make “Tin Foil Fighter”, and then “Tin Foil Fighter ][ Turbo!”, and then “Tin Fighter EX Plus Alpha”
But my ultimate game will be where you roll a reflective marble through a reflective landscape and try not to fall down the reflective holes in the reflective ground which are cleverly hidden because they are so very reflective.
But seriously, Unity will need to natively use a webcam / iSight by then because then there can be real reflections of you playing the game Ray Traced onto every surface of every thing in the game.
if I understand it correctly, realtime raytracing would allow for basically unlimited amounts of shadowing, lighting and cool caustic effects (water, glass, heat etc). I think this would cause the realism of game to dramatically increase with little effort on the developer’s part.
Well, its not really like that. I created a really simple raytracer in about 100 lines of code (http://yog3d.blogspot.com/2008/02/real-time-raytracing-p.html) which is available for download, and I have to say that if I was to expand it to allow for textures, bump mapping, refraction, caustics, indirect lighting and such it would be quite time consuming to implement and optimize.
Real time raytracing is somewhat interesting, but if one were to look at it from the perspective of a paper medium or even 2D medium computer artist it seems silly. Raytracing is about physical accuracy, but physical accuracy is not equal to beauty.
Take this image for example:
I think that is good art and it looks great. So if you want to make it be real time, how do you do it? I think raytracing won’t help you here at all. Now, there are some areas where it would be useful, but I think for the majority of 3d graphics rasterization is more efficient, especially with the amount of pixel calculations new cards like the 8800 GT can handle.
I couldn’t agree more. Well said.
Yoggy, your are a smart fellow… no doubt. so I don’t want to argue this point with you. However I do think beauty can emerge from physical accuracy, with little to effort from the so called artist. For example, a photograph of a sunset over the ocean or a creek running through a sunlit dappled forest. The beauty is coming from light and the infinite variations in it being caused by reflections and shadowing.
What I mean is that is we could get a higher level of realism in a simple tool like Unity, I’m all for it.
Cool! First thing I will do is a JC’s Unity Non-Multiplayer Being John Malkovic (only single-player mode, but you’ll play with yourself hundredfold). Ah, how I love recursion
Btw, you might want to check out this cool presentation:
I can’t tell perfectly for sure, but I guess it might possibly have a chance of being about CHICKEN
Sunny regards,
Jashan
PS: Oh, I forgot something REALLY IMPORTANT: When Unity comes with realtime raytracing, it needs to also support realtime audio-effects. In particular echo with feedback > 100%. That is a total must-have feature to accompany the visual experience with according sound-effects.
You look into the iCam, and breathe into the iMic, and you’ll got all -I- … for REAL
I can’t wait…
@Yoggy
If i can avoid such art with raytracing then i want it even more!
This is very true. But consider this: A real time scene of a sunset over the ocean or a creek running through a sunlit dappled forest. Where does the beauty come from? It sure doesn’t come from the chaotic scattering of light and physical movement of the stream, because those are impossible to calculate real time probably even on a supercomputer. It comes from the textures, the tricks, the lying, cheating and stealing that the 3D artist, animator and programmer pull over the gamers eyes to trick him. An example of what I’m talking about can be seen here, where on one side we have very fancy shaders and high res textures and such, and on the other side we have a certain gamecube game. Which looks better?
Well, those pictures doen’t say a lot. I could also provide one of those ugly next gen “look we have normals maps” images vs. raytracing images with some soft and decent lightning. Also with raytracing the difference comes with how you define a certain scene (textures, material definitions, lightning, …). You can get an idea of this if you take the time to browse through some online galleries of the better raytracing packages…
I think one thing won’t change: You will need a good artist to make good looking things.
Which techniques are used isn’t the important thing. HOW they are used is.
But I agree that the first wave of raytraced games will prolly totally overdo the newly available effects.
A bit like current games having totally unrealistic, strong pixelperfect speculars on each and every surface. (which can be kinda ugly and unrealistic too)
I would always prefer a good artistic style over technical fluff, doesn’t matter if raytraced, rasterized or whatever.
I am SO SICK of every freaking man looking like his skin is covered in glaze, and all of his bones are five times as thick as they should be.
As for raytracing, I agree with Yoggy on the artistic end. However, as with all things, the key is choice. Be free to use it or not use it.
I dunno about the rest of you guys/gals, but I have seen some pretty damn ugly but 100% physically accurate “scenes” around in real-life.
Reflective/refractive puddles of acid rain water, complete with dead worms on a cloudy day, and that weird guy with the peg-leg and the glass eye he took from an old stuffed dog. The way the glass eye catches the light when he takes it out and cleans it on his shirt…man.
Try fall in Canada when all the leaves are already down and wet and decaying and everyone is crying because 23 months of winter are on the way…
The fluid dynamics of that spurting blood from the puncture wounds that rattlesnake gave you on your trip to South Dakota is great too.
Ok, I am being sarcastic and a little too insane for public viewing, but if an artist is not involved to set up the scenes and to use the tech us programmers create properly, all we get is very accurate crap.
You will get the occasional “emergent” cool scenes out of pure luck, but in a game, it has to all be good and balanced. I think us programmers especially get excited because we think; “Man, if we get this tech, I can just point the damn light at the ground and be done with it. I wont have to struggle trying to get something mildly artistic, and I don’t have to take out a loan to hire an artist!”. I have been guilty of that a bit myself.
So let me say for all; “Long live artists/artistic people! We will always need you!”
-Jeremy
Aren’t these more and more platitudes here?!
Should be quite obvious to everyone that unless you can’t do certain things on your own, you need a person who is able to, so if you want to do music, need a bass, can’t play the bass on your own, you need a bass player. I mean…
Raytracing is a very nice, capable, flexible but slow (for todays hardware) method for generating computer graphics since many years and there is a wide range of styles you can do with it. When things on the hardware and algorithmic side speed up in a way that it can be done in realtime (full or partly) then this would be very nice. Nothing more nothing less.
All these discussions about if you prefer a certain kind of art about a more realistic view or presenting some meaningless screenshots have nothing to do with that.
Secondly such statements are also kind of a lie as most people, as visual beeings, are naturally biased towards nice graphics and are fond of the look shaders can generate for instance, otherwise you won’t be on this forum.
I’ll have to disagree on this front. First off, if your examples could be properly rendered by an artificial means, then there would be beauty in the representation. Secondly, what is gruesome to some is quite palatable to others…
Haha I like gruesome stuff myself, and my main fav game genre is shooters.
My simple point is, accurate does not mean beautiful. Simple as that. When someone comes up with a method so we can smell the game world, it isn’t just going to be “freakin awesome” unless someone with skill uses that tool properly, and artistically. I don’t want to smell the dog doo, unless the feeling I get from smelling it is important for the emotional response the designers are trying to achieve in that part of the game.
Uh, yeah… Thanks for clearing that up.
I understand your core point here, but I don’t really think most of us are kickin’ around here to oogle shader technology, realtime shadows, post production image effects, or David in a bathing suit.
These are all just tools (which I believe is your core point). I look at screenshots and tech demos at ign/whereever to oogle that stuff. I am here to make games, learn more about my chosen tool, and help others learn more about their chosen tool…
Raytracing is cool. We are agreed. 
-Jeremy
Well, for sure it’s not the only reason but i’m quite confident that quite some people are here because the better image quality unity can offer in comparison to other tools like for instance shockwave if you run into situations were you need it. May this be because of shader effects, some architecture advantages like beeing able to sync to the vertical blank, a decent speed, or antialiasing. All these aspects come together obviously with things which have nothing to do with graphics too.
Raytracing is cool. We are agreed.
<<<
Then there is nothing more to say… :O)