Brigade 3.0 - real-time path tracing

 Brigade 3.0 preview - Real-time path tracing (using 2 Nvidia GTX Titans). The video below is using the most recent build of Brigade, keep in mind that a lot of work is being done and the noise might dramatically be improved in the next months.

What is path tracing?

Brigade uses path tracing, which is an extension to the ray tracing algorithm capable of producing photo-realistic images. It simulates many light paths per pixel, and takes the average value to calculate the final color of each pixel.

Whenever a ray hits a surface, a new ray is traced from that hitpoint in a random direction until the max path depth is reached or until a Russian roulette-like mechanism kills the ray.

This way, path tracing is able to produce effects like diffuse color bleeding, glossy (blurry) reflections, soft shadows, real area lights, true depth of field, and much more…

Fast engine

Brigade use NVIDIA and AMD hardware to do path tracing on the GPU. All rendering kernels are fine-tuned for every card to give maximum performance combined with special scene-graph optimizations that are unique to Brigade, allows us to bring real-time path tracing to video games.

Instancing is one of the most powerful features of Brigade. It allows you to instance any kind of mesh you want. (Trees, grass, cars for heavy traffic in cities, etc…) It’s up to you ! Performance wise, each instance is the same loss as rendering one single triangle.

Because Brigade uses a very specific custom acceleration structure, It can create multi-million or even billion polygons scenes without a sweat. Brigade also supports animation for bones (with skinning), cameras, objects & more using COLLADA files.

What is it for?

OTOY Inc. announced that game developers worldwide will be able to leverage Brigade, its path tracing and rendering technology for photorealistic next-generation games, through Amazon EC2 in the second half of the year. OTOY is concurrently launching a seamless physically-based art pipeline for Brigade, shared with OTOY’s OctaneRender™ software and supported across all major 3D modeling packages.

• Expanding the Brigade developer program – Through Brigade, OTOY is now helping leading game developers explore the potential of cloud computing for the delivery of next-generation games. Brigade is a powerful graphics API that can easily replace Microsoft DirectX® or OpenGL® graphics within popular game engines such as Epic Games’ Unreal Engine or Unity, serving as a backend for superior graphics without disrupting the game logic. Harnessing the power of the cloud, Brigade’s sophisticated technology enables real-time ray tracing and path tracing of game environments, simulating light as it appears in the real world to deliver in-game interactive graphics that are on par with the best movie effects of today. Frames that traditionally have taken minutes or longer to render now do so in fractions of a second, allowing for a fluid game experience streamed to consumers’ homes without the need for expensive hardware.
  
  

• Next generation final render art pipeline for Brigade, powered by OctaneRender™, supported across all major 3D modeling tools – OctaneRender™, OTOY’s acclaimed rendering software, and Brigade now share the same code base, allowing extraordinarily complex 3D scenes, materials, lighting and objects rendered in OctaneRender™ to be effortlessly loaded into Brigade for gaming and other interactive applications. Similarly, Brigade is now compatible with 15 of the top modeling programs through OctaneRender™ plugins. The end result is a pain-free art pipeline that lets developers easily transition detailed game assets from the program of their choosing to Brigade.
  
  

• Developing via Brigade on Amazon EC2 – Delivering physically accurate photorealistic games demands a compute-intensive environment that’s affordable, scalable, and up to the task. In the second half of 2014, OTOY will make Brigade Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) available via Amazon EC2 to facilitate testing and development of next-generation games.

“We’re quickly approaching a time where rasterization-based gaming APIs won’t be able to keep pace with the realism gamers demand,” said Jules Urbach, Founder and CEO, OTOY. “As media and entertainment companies look to leverage existing assets across movie, television, and game mediums, and as we face an ever more connected future, the top game studios know that the cloud is the logical solution. We have the distinct pleasure of working with several premiere developers using Brigade to explore jaw-dropping next-generation games, and with today’s announcement we look forward to getting Brigade into even more developers’ hands in the near future.”

For more information on Brigade visit https://brigade3.com/.