Imagination at Siggraph 13
July 24, 2013, Siggraph, Anaheim, CA—We met with Imagination to look at their latest software and acceleration hardware for graphics. The Caustic tools can use the ray-tracing accelerator card, has a simplified user interface, and has visualization links to other tools.
The ray tracing technology is moving into the professional markets for some parts of he images like shaders. Over time, the technology will move to mobile devices, when the development tools become more widely available and the mobile device makers integrate the IP into the chipsets. Eventually, gaming and shopping will use ray tracing for their images. Ray tracing is being integrated into many other tools and all of the game engines. They have built in links to the Unity game engine.
The Maya and 3D Max tools from Autodesk are some of the external tools that can be accelerated. Some of the features supported include accelerated rendering, always-on, CPU-accelerated ray-traced rendering for the Maya 3D viewport and for final-file delivery. Most advanced rendering and indirect lighting effects are supported including: true reflections, soft shadows, diffuse reflections, caustics, incandescence, and global illumination (GI). Illumination types include Maya and mental ray types and their attributes including area lights, mental ray IBL, and mental ray “physical sun and sky.”
All Maya geometry types are supported including procedural geometry, NURBS, polygons, SubD surfaces, and renderable splines. All major camera operations are supported including depth of field (DOF). The tools support all major Maya material types (both standard and mental ray) are supported including mental ray “mia”, “metallic paint” and “car paint” shaders.
System requirements for the Caustic tools working with Maya are:
Caustic Visualizer accelerated software plugin for Maya is optimized for use with Intel-based workstations supporting Intel AVX technology. System memory should be adequate to support your normal Maya use with scenes in your typical workflow.
Note that use of the Caustic Visualizer will incur some additional system memory requirements. The additional amounts are highly scene dependent and can be determined most effectively by running typical scenes through the free trial of Visualizer for Maya. For additional hardware requirements and specific details on supported Autodesk Maya and mental ray compatibility, please review the release notes at www.caustic.com/visualizer/maya.
The visualization can be accelerated with the Caustic graphics accelerator card family comprised of the R2100 and R2500. The R2500 card brings ray-traced graphics featuring low power requirements, a suite of supporting applications, and platform software. Users can add a fully interactive and photorealistic editing mode and rapid ‘casual rendering’ to the applications they use every day. Productivity is increased through visual feedback during modeling, highly interactive and accurate visual scene setup, and photorealistic previsualizing – without requiring frequent final-frame ‘test’ renderings.
Caustic’s R2500 shading architecture is much more flexible than those found in GPU only solutions. Large scenes are supported, with large textures referenced directly from system memory. An open, compiled shader system provides flexibility and power that cannot be matched by fixed materials. Non-realistic rendering, complex light/object interactions, and programmable procedural shaders are all supported.
The cards are PCIe x16 Gen 2.0 – single height, and bus powered. The tools run under Windows 7 and Vista (32-bit and 64-bit) with 16 GB of scene geometry (up to 120 million triangles). The ray-tracing hardware puts a ray tracing subsystem on the bus to perform tasks previously requiring multiple GPUs. The boards support all third-party Imagination PowerVR Brazil SDK and OpenRL based renderers and applications.
