Reflect / Brigade2

(L) [2012/01/25] [tby jbikker] [Reflect / Brigade2] Wayback!

Here's a fresh video of the student game 'Reflect':

This is running on 2 GTX470s, at 512x320, 24spp.
The original Reflect was made using an early version of Brigade 1. At some point, we tried porting it to a more recent version of the engine, but this proved to be difficult. Jeroen van Schijndel took the art, and made a quick-and-dirty game using Brigade 2. The effect is quite interesting: Brigade 2 provides significantly improved quality and performance.
We will be adding some better lighting, and perhaps a few extra rooms. After that, the game will be released in binary and source format.
- Jacco.

(L) [2012/01/25] [ost by jbikker] [Reflect / Brigade2] Wayback!

Here's a fresh video of the student game 'Reflect':

[IFRAME n/a]

This is running on 2 GTX470s, at 512x320, 24spp.

The original Reflect was made using an early version of Brigade 1. At some point, we tried porting it to a more recent version of the engine, but this proved to be difficult. Jeroen van Schijndel took the art, and made a quick-and-dirty game using Brigade 2. The effect is quite interesting: Brigade 2 provides significantly improved quality and performance.

We will be adding some better lighting, and perhaps a few extra rooms. After that, the game will be released in binary and source format.

- Jacco.

(L) [2012/01/25] [tby straaljager] [Reflect / Brigade2] Wayback!

Great video and image quality compared to the previous Reflect version. The MIS seems to work its magic [SMILEY :D]
The swinging lights casting soft shadows are a very cool effect, as well as the multiple refractions in the room with the glass tubes.
When you enter the room with the spikepit (0:57), initially there is a lot of noise which seems to disappear after a few seconds. How does that work?

(L) [2012/01/25] [tby jbikker] [Reflect / Brigade2] Wayback!

It's quite important to prepare scenes that work well with the path tracer. This has little to do with MIS: it's all a matter of using large light sources, not too much occlusion, and to go easy on the speculars. There are several nice examples in this video:
- The noise in the room with the spikes goes down once we turn the lights in another room off. This reduces the number of shadow rays that is sent to lights that cannot be reached. Simple trick, maybe a hack, but it works.
- The hallways are noisy even though there's plenty of light. Larger lights would have been better.
- The glass tube room is very noisy. We are looking into this; perhaps half-plastic tubes will be better, perhaps lots of lights reduce the noise, but it's also quite likely that an object like this is not really possible without more power (and perhaps BDPT).
Speed in this video is further possitively influenced by running physics and rendering in parallel (minimizing time between frames), and simple geometry. Even though the level is quite a large amount of polygons, each room is simple, which helps.
By the way, we make these games just for this kind of experience.
- Jacco.

(L) [2012/01/26] [tby jbikker] [Reflect / Brigade2] Wayback!

Fresh demos and other stuff is now available from [LINK http://igad.nhtv.nl/~bikker] . Reflect demo will be released tomorrow; everything is looking good. We're testing it on a quad-GPU machine. [SMILEY :)]

(L) [2012/01/30] [tby jbikker] [Reflect / Brigade2] Wayback!

>> beason wrote:Why do the lights have to be large? You don't choose samples directly on the lights...?
The number of rays that hit these lights via a random bounce (importance sampled via de brdf) is larger. This also increases the number of cases where MIS can make a difference, since this requires both the explicit and the implicit light path to hit the light source.
We have just uploaded a fresh version of the Reflect demo. It's quite a bit smaller, and should reduce physics issues on slower systems.

(L) [2012/02/03] [tby jbikker] [Reflect / Brigade2] Wayback!

We just released a trailer for a second path traced student game, titled "It's About Time". The students do not consider this one finished, so it will not be released right now. The trailer shows how well outdoor scenery works in Brigade. Video:

As usual, the video is much nicer if you download the original:
[LINK http://igad.nhtv.nl/~bikker/files/About.avi]
That's also the best option for people in Germany, because we used some 'borrowed' music and Youtube found out. [SMILEY :)]
- Jacco.

(L) [2012/02/03] [ost by jbikker] [Reflect / Brigade2] Wayback!

We just released a trailer for a second path traced student game, titled "It's About Time". The students do not consider this one finished, so it will not be released right now. The trailer shows how well outdoor scenery works in Brigade. Video:
[IFRAME n/a]
As usual, the video is much nicer if you download the original:
[LINK http://igad.nhtv.nl/~bikker/files/About.avi]
That's also the best option for people in Germany, because we used some 'borrowed' music and Youtube found out. [SMILEY :)]

- Jacco.

Reflect / Brigade2 back

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