Algorithm for Interactive Indirect Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing | Hacker News Reader

Algorithm for Interactive Indirect Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing

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Brilliant! My company had a short spell in the very early 90's where we dabbled in 3D product visualization for clients with 3D Studio on DOS. At the time we were writing add-ons and engineering tools for Autodesk products and exploring other fields we could use our talents. While it never went that far for us commercially I still love to follow how the 3D modeling world has transformed since then. From 2-3 hour renders to 60 FPS today on MUCH more complex models... demos like this still get me excited.

Is there a paper on this?

I found a very brief PDF here: http://artis.imag.fr/Publications/2011/CNSGE11/

If anyone finds more detailed information, I would be very interested too.

Following the details link on youtube yields what wtracy found. Looking around the site, I managed to dig this [0] up, which, judging by the filename, will be used in their Siggraph talk. Unfortunately, it is still very brief and doesn't expand much on the preview. Here's [1] the paper that it references, which does give more detail about voxel rendering.

Though I haven't looked very much into the techniques in voxel rendering, it seems animation, to this point, has been only a theoretical possibility and a huge setback. That Crassin et al. can achieve a reasonable framerate on such complex scenes struck me as a very big achievement. We'll probably have to wait a few more months for more details, though.

[0] : http://artis.imag.fr/Publications/2011/CNSGE11a/GIVoxels_Sig...

[1] : http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.158...

The information given is so utterly vague that I could be completely wrong, but: As far as I can tell, all their geometry is still polygon based. (I saw a few references to polygon counts in the video.) I believe that it is the lighting that is volumetric.

If I understand correctly, they use both in parallel: low resolution, animated voxels for the light map, and high resolution, detailed rasterized polygons for the final rendering pass.

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