Project Lavina has demonstrated photorealistic CG rendering with stunning 90fps visuals.
At SIGGRAPH last week, Chaos Group showed off Project Lavina. This is a demonstration of photorealistic real-time ray tracing. Ten years ago at LA’s SIGGRAPH 2008, Chaos debuted their first GPU acceleration work. This technology has gone on to evolve from a fast preview renderer (V-Ray RT) into the fast, full-featured production renderer used by artists and designers around the world: V-Ray GPU.
Using a dedicated RT Core within NVIDIA’s Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs which was also announced and demoed during SIGGRAPH, Chaos Group’s Project Lavina has shown the road ahead for CGI and visual effects, introducing a new level of visual quality for real-time games, VR, and 3D visualization.
Project Lavina, named after the Bulgarian word for avalanche, debuted as a SIGGRAPH tech demo, depicting a massive 3D forest and several architectural visualizations running at 24-30fps in standard HD resolution. The SIGGRAPH tech demo uses 3D scenes exported from V-Ray-enabled applications directly in Lavina. Unlike a traditional game engine which requires assets to be rebuilt and specially optimised, Lavina now simplifies this process with direct compatibility and translation of V-Ray assets. Upon loading the scene, the user can explore the environment exactly as they would in a game engine, and experience physically accurate lighting, reflections and global illumination, all in real time. Lavina is able to handle massive scenes at real-time speeds – over 300 billion triangles in one case – without any loss in detail.
“We’ve been developing ray tracing technology for 20 years, and this is one of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve ever made,” said Vlado Koylazov, co-founder and CTO at Chaos Group. “Real-time and ray tracing coming together is the beginning of something big.”
This is Chaos Group’s second real-time announcement in the last year, following the beta release of V-Ray for Unreal. Seeing a growing demand for real-time applications, Chaos Group has developed a way to tie ray tracing to both kinds of workflows, upping the fidelity of this emerging medium. Soon, users will be able to apply the most realistic style of rendering to every type of interactive project, including 3D configurators, virtual productions and VR, using the toolset they like best.
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