At SIGGRAPH 2018, we saw another advance toward real-time ray tracing with Unreal Engine. A joint presentation by Epic Games, NVIDIA, and Porsche resulted in “Speed of Light”, a real-time cinematic showcasing the current state of this developing technology with the interplay of multiple light sources over the smooth surfaces of the Porsche Speedster concept car. The real-time example was the highlight of NVIDIA’s keynote demonstrating the possibilities of real-time ray tracing.
In-depth interview with François Antoine, Director of Embedded Systems at Epic Games, about this project can be found on Unreal page.
“We broke a lot of new ground on this project: a fully ray-traced dynamic scene with multiple shadowed and textured area lights, true area light sampling, ray-traced translucent and clear coat shading models, reflection shadow denoising, and screen space real-time ray-traced global illumination,” says François Antoine, Director of Embedded Systems at Epic Games, who acted as VFX supervisor on the project.