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A comment on Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan. Parent comment

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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