CHICAGO—SIGGRAPH 2020 featured a vast lineup of emerging technology demos, research, and sessions that shine a light on what’s new in ray tracing innovations. This year, the SIGGRAPH conference hosted the first fully virtual event in its history. Participants were able to learn about ray tracing advancements on demand and during scheduled sessions, with content accessible through 27 October.
Spanning everything from new rendering pipelines, applications in projection mapping, path tracing, spatial hashing, real-time rendering, ambient and partial occlusion, depth of field, and motion blur rendering, the computer graphics community has left no stone unturned. In addition to juried selections across multiple conference programs, SIGGRAPH 2020 exhibitors also shared demos and insights on their latest work in ray tracing.
“The SIGGRAPH Posters program selected some truly incredible research this year that just so happens to include several projects which offer new approaches to ray tracing technology,” noted SIGGRAPH 2020 Posters Chair Ana Cecilia Balliache Liendo, of Schell Games. “The inspiring, industry-leading contributions from across the computer graphics and interactive techniques research communities unite us and are sure to provoke even more dialogue and innovation around the possibilities of this tech in the future.”
Highlights include:
Real-time Ray-traced Ambient Occlusion of Complex Scenes Using Spatial Hashing | Talks
Learn how using extended spatial hashing for efficient storage, multiresolution AO evaluation, and ad-hoc filtering computes ambient occlusion in milliseconds in CAD scenes.
High Fidelity Rendering Unleashed with Intel | Exhibitor Session
This session will provide insight on the exa-trends pushing rendering and ray tracing to new boundaries, and how a full platform approach with hardware, software, memory, and other technologies accelerate visualization and compute.
Hybrid DOF: Ray-traced and Post-processed Hybrid Depth of Field Effect for Real-time Rendering | Posters
This novel, real-time depth of field approach mixes rasterization and ray tracing-based techniques to produce more accurate partial occlusion semi-transparencies.
Visualization of Angle-dependent Plasmonic Structural Coloration by FDTD-simulated BSDF and Ray-tracing Rendering | Posters
Visualize angle-dependent structural coloration from plasmonic nanostructures through this new rendering pipeline.
RTX Accelerated Ray Tracing with OptiX 7 | Courses
Led by NVIDIA’s Director of Ray Tracing Ingo Wald and VP of Professional Graphics Steven Parker, this course is aimed at programmers interested in using OptiX to write RTX accelerated applications.
Spatiotemporal Reservoir Resampling for Real-time Ray Tracing With Dynamic Direct Lighting | Technical Papers
Researchers from Dartmouth College and NVIDIA introduce a new algorithm based on resampling that renders direct lighting from millions of dynamic light sources interactively using Monte Carlo without the need to maintain complex data structures.
Realistic Dynamic Projection Mapping Using Real-time Ray Tracing | Emerging Technologies From Tokyo Institute of Technology, get a glimpse of dynamic projection mapping using path tracing through this method that leverages persistence of vision.
“Ray tracing has been around in the movies and in entertainment for years,” adds SIGGRAPH 2020 Conference Chair Kristy Pron, of Walt Disney Imagineering. “But, ever since the real-time ray tracing demo from NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2018, it’s been exciting to see how computer graphics has continued to push boundaries and find new uses for this remarkable technology.”
Image caption: 307M triangles Servers scene, ambient occlusion computed in 4.1ms @ 1080p on NVIDIA Quadro RTX8000