EVE General Discussion

Raytracing is a technique for rendering images that traces large numbers of the paths that light takes through the scene. It's very accurate but very time consuming. Other rendering techniques simplify the problem by using various approximations that are less accurate but produce a look that's acceptable.

Here's a lot more information on the topic than I can offer here:

Wikipedia article on raytracing for computer graphics

translation: an object will not glow brighter than light that is shed on it.

overall PBR is a concept that entails texturing things according to the surface material, true-to-life rather than an imaginary way for the sake of looking cool in a specific setting.

is this correct

Great! Thanks for clarifying the difference! PBR is pretty much the future in visual effects and older scanline / depth mapped / caching methods are going the way of the dodo. I have used Arnold which is an unbiased PBR raytracer, and ofcourse the older Mental Ray which is biased but supports caustics thanks to photon mapping.

Are there any plans to implement bounce light? I thought that walking in stations demo actually had this technique implemented? Or maybe it was just a tech demo?

It calculates many different rays and how rays interact with materials and lights. With raytracing it's possible to render not just shadow rays but refraction, reflection, bounce, etc. One implementation of raytracing is the brute force monte carlo method, which basically is like a gun that just fires random shots into the projection plane / camera plane and "samples" the environment.

This method is great for outdoor scenes however when you deal with interior lighting monte carlo can be very noisy and time consuming to raytrace. Metropolis light transport is a more efficient way to solve the problem of light traveling through a keyhole in a room and scattering around. Light coming through a keyhole is very difficult to trace with monte carlo raytracing with acceptable render quality. This is why render engines like V Ray cheat by giving the user a "light portal", where the artist can specify the direction of light and force the render engine to sample using light portals as guides.

There are Fresnel parameters. I haven't looked closely to see how the implementation handles them, but I'd assume they're rolled into the BRDF.

Who would have thought, a good thread by IZ.

I'm pretty sure I remember seeing global illumination for World of Darkness and walking in stations. Unity, Cryengine and Unreal all support their version of GI and Octane is pushing quickly into the gaming marketplace. Raytracing is the future of graphics.

Eve already supports volumetric lighting in case you have not noticed. :)

HP already has 64 core machines, so it's only a matter of time before eve online is streamed from a cloud of supercomputers onto your old laptop.

CCP any plans for offering a streaming EVE online version for a premium price?

EVE's textures are mip-mapped as a level of detail optimization, so if one needs a blurred texture, reading a lower mip level is the easiest way to do it. That said, that wouldn't offer much flexibility in BRDF choice, so I'm not sure what the engine is doing internally.

As for volumetric effects, we have them, but I believe we're not using a fully-raytraced approach to get there. I probably shouldn't speculate about what alternative we're using, but there are a couple.

EVE's current graphics engine is called Trinity, and was released in the (wait for it...) Trinity expansion. I suspect it's no accident that our best-equipped conference room is named after that expansion.

Great soundtrack for Trinity as well. ;)