Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

Re:Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing E... by ladon86 on Friday March 22, 2019 @12:04PM (#19463862)

But it's not down to polygons or details in the environment - the simple architecture still looks realistic with the addition of realistic lighting. In the quest for realism, modern games have so many details, dirt and grit everywhere [1]. Perhaps going forward artists can let the lighting do more work and still represent realistic clean environments. I loved this blocky room in Half Life 1 for the dramatic (prebaked) lighting: http://combineoverwiki.net/images/thumb/3/37/C2a4e_lobby.jpg...

[1] just look at Doom 2016: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/20160...

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Re:Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing E... by fwip on Friday March 22, 2019 @01:12PM (#19464595)

A whole lot of the benefit is the added "normal and roughness maps for added surface detail."

If they hadn't done the hard work of basically retexturing every single surface, it wouldn't look half as good. Without depth, ray-tracing looks incredibly flat, like this: http://builder.openhmd.net/blender-hmd-viewport-temp/_images...

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Re:Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing E... by a_f on Friday March 22, 2019 @04:46PM (#19466761)

I believe the origanal proof of concept didn't do the retexturing, and just focused on the lighting; it looks fantastic: http://brechpunkt.de/q2vkpt/

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Re:Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing E... by int_19h on Friday March 22, 2019 @10:48PM (#19468755)

How hard would it be to automatically derive such maps from textures? After all, they are already drawn to visually imply that with shading, so wouldn't it be possible to e.g. train a model to extract that information, just as our eye does?

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