Siggraph 2014: Rendering Glints on High-Resolution Normal-Mapped Specular Surfaces

[@SuckItLily]

That last example actually looks like it could make it into games or offline rendering. That is, if it makes sense from a performance point of view. Does it?

[@tehlolzfactor]

It could in theory, but only if it is a prebaked model with prebaked light maps, animations, and textures. Usually, the amount of time it takes to render this kind of ocean animation (only a few seconds of video) can take hours on a very strong computer and days on a normal daily use computer. In order to have this kind of thing work in real time, meaning always being rendered continuously, like in video games, you would need to do an operation called baking to the animation, the lighting, and the textures. What this means is that everything is packed into the model when it is exported into the game. If you were to try to add lights or animations after baking and try to have them work in realtime, they would not affect the model. This is used a lot in games for static objects like rooms and non-moving furniture.

[@johnsherfey3675]

could you do this in a realtime Path tracer?

[@TitusSc]

John Sherfey real time path tracing isn't even a thing yet and is far more power hungry than current raster based engines for real time. But yeah, it could

[@johnsherfey3675]

Tao S. Umm yeah real time is a thing. Brigade engine is a good example

[@TitusSc]

John Sherfey that's what I'm saying: it's not a thing. Brigade has been in closed (but like really close) beta for the last 3 or 4 years, none of the current consoles nor the best graphics cards out there meets its need quite much to provide noise free stable images with a stable frame rate and not a single commercial project has been using it. Real time path tracing is probably (I hope) gonna be a thing in 5 to 10 years, and it's gonna be quite a thing. But right now, there isn't any commercial real time application that uses a path tracer or that plans using one and there are only a couple experiments in the works afaik (like Brigade).

[@paulvincent1511]

Marco Polo ! La pouissance ! La seigneurie !