Hello GPU .001

[Matt]

Introducing "VOLR", a volumetric renderer that runs on GPU, CPU or both. There's a lot of work ahead of me to make this renderer ready for production, but I want to start sharing some renders, even boring ones like this, so you can see how it improves over time. Render times are... okay. It will get faster. In this image all of the indirect illumination is calculated using a multiple scattering algorithm that's also responsible for some of the light bouncing inside the clouds. No caches = no headaches. The clouds are just a simple fractal with 6 octaves of noise - just to give the renderer something to chew on.

[Hannes]

Well yeah, quite boring....
WOOOOOW!!! That's good news!! Cool, Matt!

[Dune]

Yeah! That's great, Matt. Progress!! Can you tell us anything about the speed compared to a standard render with CPU?

[masonspappy]

Looks pretty darn nice!

[aknight0]

Exciting!

[mhaze]

Fantastic.

[WinterLight]

Ooh! This is going to be great when it's ready

[pokoy]

Matt, great to see progress on this!

Please make sure to go for a scattering model that's maximally realistic, especially with varying phase function. The currently present simplifications in TG's v3 model are posing real challenges depending on where the lighting is coming from and need a lot of tweaking while not allowing for a 100% realistic results in some cases. I know it comes with a toll on performance.

Also, make sure import of VDBs is somewhere on the soon-to-come list, we have some ways of generating really good cloud shapes now (with EmberGen for example) but need to be able to import and render them in whatever the future of TG looks like.