WebGL Path Tracing | Hacker News Reader

WebGL Path Tracing

madebyevan.com

95 pointswgx24 comments

Win64 8.1 HD3000

Here is my experience.

On chrome it works, but... after about 15 seconds my graphics card driver crashes and the demo goes black. While it was working the demo was very laggy.

On firefox it worked, perfectly. It was smoothly responsive and noise was barely noticeable after 3secs.

On internet Explorer, trying to change the scene presets causes mem usage to climb furiously to to the point you have to kill it. otherwise the demo run beautifully and was very responsive.

I made a path traced online game few years ago ... What do you think about it? http://pog.ivank.net/

It is black for me -- thus I think it is sort of broke.

Doesn't seem to work well in Chrome on OS X. The scene is all green, with black rendering speckles accumulating all over. I can play for a few seconds, but can't see much after a little bit.

Worked well for me. It looks very very noisy for me though, much more so than the screenshots you have. Does it automatically scale the number of samples to get a playable frame rate?

The result is bright bluish and a lot of noise. I can move around with WASD but unsure of what to do. Both Chrome and FF yield same result. Running Ubuntu with nvidia GT750m(proprietary driver).

Works great in Chrome 39. I can see the noise but it looks like part of the style and not distracting at all. I love how it creates fear! They come at you when your back is turned. Though I found you can just run backwards in a circle to consistently dodge them, at least got 88.9 seconds that way.

Blazing fast on both Chrome and Firefox. Running on Ubuntu 14.04, nvidia gt750m(proprietary driver)

I wonder how would it hold up for complex scene with lots of different materials. And how far it is form having effects like Caustic.

It works great on Firefox ESR 31.

However on Android 4.3 and 4.4 with Chrome 39, using a Qualcomm Adreno 305 GPU, I just get a black box. As usual with most WebGL stuff.

Very nice. We do something similar, but with a production quality raytracer (V-Ray) in the browser:

https://clara.io/view/756670ed-61b9-4df8-82a7-74172814a8a2/r...

Well, technically on a remote server that streams in.

that's awesome! Love the idea of letting people choose between an image, lower fidelity image, and V-Ray stream.

Working on some web based VR stuff - would love to hear your thoughts: http://www.insitevr.com/

Neat stuff. We have an SDK that allows you to use our V-Ray rendering and our WebGL embeds in your own applications. We even license our full code base. Might be a solution to move your stuff ahead faster and also share our render farm.

https://clara.io/learn/sdk

E.g.: http://exocortex.github.io/apple-watch/

We will have VR support soon too as many people are requesting it. And we could collaborate on improving our import support: Sketchup, Rhino, etc.

Seriously, we should work together. :)

This is really interesting and fast-ish. Who is the target audience for this though? Is there a bridge to 3D apps and you are a render farm or what? I can't imagine a scenario where everything is online in a browser?

Everything is online in the browser with Clara.io - modeling, animation, rendering, sharing, etc. Just sign up and try it.

I will! I was wondering what's the use case? Same as any desktop 3d app but in browser? Was wondering, because in most studios I've been at you can't even access internet from workstations you work on.

I love the way it's at the end of the ray tracing that the quality seems, visually, to improve dramatically. It's almost as if, perceptually, a lot of noise or a bit of noise are quite similar, but no noise is hugely more pleasing to the eye. This also explains why some of the lower megapixel cameras which create less pixel noise sometimes have better perceptual quality.

> This also explains why some of the lower megapixel cameras which create less pixel noise sometimes have better perceptual quality.

I'm pretty sure in those cases the higher megapixel cameras also have straight up lower SNR.

Loading the table and chair scene caused a huge memory leak, quickly consuming 14GB of memory and then crashing Firefox.

It's still a cool demo though!

Make sure you move the camera (click-and-drag) and the objects in the scene (click to select then drag the bounding box).

(FYI, this crashes chrome for me) Works great in Safari, incredibly performant!

Doesn't work on chrome (Linux Mint)

When you say Chrome, is it Chrome or Chromium? Do the javascript execution and webgl performance same on both?

Chrome and javascript & webgl enabled.

Using Mint 17 with Chrome and it's working great.

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