real time ray tracing demos

With new processors software only real time ray tracing is becoming possible. This page contains many real time ray tracing demos.

Many of the older demos demos do low level tricks writing directly to registers of the graphics card and so will not run on Windows NT. They must be run in dos mode under windows 95, or 98. They probably will run for the most part on machines running ms-dos.

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

FAN/realstorm continues to have the best software only PC real time ray tracing I know of. They have released their third real time ray tracing demo, Still Sucking Nature. Its their best effort yet with all kinds of really nice lighting effects, very believable textures etc. The rendering is getting good enough in fact, that problems we used to forgive in demos like this, like the aliasing artifacts start to become important. Very impressive demo though. If you download only one demo, get the newest from FAN. If you are interested in them, check out their we site www.realstorm.com. They have more stuff there - some non-real time high resolution renders, movies and a bowling game they are working on.

Some screenshots from the demo are below:



Wednesday, August 14, 2002
After receiving no new real time ray tracing demos for some time, I recently got three new ones.

REALSTORM BENCH

First, there is a new, and very impressive demo from FAN. This one is called RealStorm Benchmark. It seems to have larger and more complex scenes, and comes with a tool that gives you pretty detailed performance information for your system while running the demo. The look of the demo is not too different from the previous and also excellent FAN demos, NatureSuxx and NatureStillSuxx. The scenes are composed of textured platonic solids. The list of rendering features, lighting effects, texture mapping etc. is getting quite impressive. The lighting, shadows, reflections and plasma effects are just fantastic. But then what do you expect, we are ray tracing!

It is still not at a level competitive with hardware accelerated polygon rendering. Compared to hardware, the resolution is still relatively low, frame rates are kind of choppy, the geometry is fairly simple. But we are getting closer - we can actually compare them!

You can find out more about RealStorm from the RealStorm website.

Here are a bunch of screens from the demo:

an interior room nice shadows now we're cooking with plasma
the most complex scene rtrt scene I've scene yet lights and shadows everywhere glorious volumetric lights

TREZEBEES

The second it is trezebees, sent to me by Nils Desle. Its a new demo, which is not as far along as FAN, but looks very promising. It does all the basic ray tracing very well, platonic solids, reflections, textures, etc. The scenes are very simple as well. What is especially nice about this demo is that the author describes his ray interpolation routine. Essentially, rays are computed on a grid every N pixels, and if all the rays strike the same object, and the color on each corner of the region is not too different, then the color beween the rays is simply interpolated between the four corners. This technique has been described before, and can be used with polygon hardware to render the interpolated patches. If you use polygon hardware you can even interpolate using textured polygons.

Here are a bunch of screens from the trezebees. The black and white screens cannot actually be seen in the demo. They represent which pixels in the scene are actually ray traced, and which are interpolated.

an interior room nice shadows now we're cooking with plasma now we're cooking with plasma
the most complex scene rtrt scene I've scene yet lights and shadows everywhere glorious volumetric lights
the most complex scene rtrt scene I've scene yet lights and shadows everywhere glorious volumetric lights
You can read more about trezebees on its web site. There is a well written document there describing the techniques used for this demo.

TRIXEL

Lastly, there was release recently of a demo of volumetric ray tracing called Trixel. Its not nearly as impressive looking as RealStorm, or Trezebees. Mostly because it has a very simple lighting model, but source is available and it may have some interesting insights on how to implement a such a system. I have not had time to look at the code myself yet.
Tuesday, April 24, 2001

I have two new ray tracing demos. FAN has released a new demo, called Nature Still Suxx. It has lots of new and interesting features. Smoke, fire, nicer specular highlights. There is lots of stuff in their older demo, Nature Suxx, that they are not doing in this new one, like simulated water, so that one is also still worth seeing.

Here are some screenshots of the new demo (click to enlarge ):

a bunch of chrome spheres an interior space made of spheres and cylinders a simple object made from a few polygons
nice lighting on this chessboard shadows and fire check out the highlights on this temple

He sent me another cool demo Juggler from Mekka/Symposium, by "Han Solo". Its not so amazing until you know that it is all done in 4k. Just remember that next time you are complaining about CDs not being big enough to fit your game.

Thursday, January 18, 2001

The absolute most impressive demo I have is naturesuxx from FAN ( federation against nature ). Truly impressive. Unlike the majority of the demos the rendered scenes are composed of some actual geometry and not just a few platonic solids ( spheres, cubes etc. ). Some of the people that made this demo are from a group called Oxyron.

I recently received an email from TTS/Oxyron, the programmer on this demo, where among other things he writes:

You may use the following keys during the Demo: "Numpad 1" to reduce Speed to 1 fps synchronized speed, this doesnt mean the Engine runs slower, but smoother then you may press "c" at any time to get a free Camera, where you can move the cam with your mouse, right mouse button for forward flying, left mousebutton for backward flying, after you watched enough, you may press "numpad 0" to go back to demo timing. We are planning to have a new Demo on Mekka/Symposium 2001 out, with some very interesting new features in that Raytracing Engine.

Finally, here are some screen shots of naturesuxx that I got from the Oxyron web site:

nature suxx nature suxx nature suxx

Older Stuff

I also have three very good 64k ray tracing demos. All three are very similar. They do ray tracing on collections of simple primitives, spheres, planes and tubes. Its pretty amazing what you can do with 64k.

heaven7 - This is by a four person programming team, Exceed. This won first prize for a 64k PC Intro at mekka/symposium 2000, Fallingbostel, Germany.

pr-dast - from a team called Power Rangers that is also worth checking out. Very fast and high res.

net-eh - This is a demo called event horizon by a team called netilium. This was entered in Dreamhack 2000, Borlange Sweden.

I also have an older set of demos from the ACM's Transactions on Graphics page. These demos were written for older chips and so are not as impressive the previous three demos.

rtrtdemo.zip

Title Author(s) Year
Chrome Tomcat/Abaddon 1995
Transgression Mfx 12/1995
Chrome 2 Tomcat/Abaddon 8/1996
Transgression 2 Mfx 1/1996
Ah! Pulse 3/1997
Uh! Pulse 3/1997
Gamma Mfx 6/1997
Just like antani Bug2Fix 7/1997
I feel like I could Spinning Kids 9/1997
Sink Pulse 12/1997
Gamma 2 Mfx 12/1997
Jive 2 Sublogic 4/1998
Sviluppo insostenibile Spinning Kids 12/1998
Taint (and old version) Spinning Kids 3/1999
(Independent) Love Bong Contrast 1/1999
Rubicon Suburban 3/1999
Ray of light Magic and Schatz 4/1999
joLLy apoLLo INF 7/1999
Dallas Sublogic & Blocc 9/1999
Rotation hyperboloid Muhmac/Freestyle 10/1999
Slumpism Pathos 10/1999

Here are the other real time ray tracing demos I have. Some of these are still works in progress:

Pentrace TomCat 1998
Reltrace Damien George 2000

To find out more about real time ray tracing you can join a real time ray tracing email list at: http://www.onelist.com/community/realtime_raytracing

Here is the real time ray tracing faq that is often posted on the ray real time ray tracing mailing list.

There is a general reay tracing news archive that often has information about real time ray tracing techniques called Ray Tracing News Guide.

Or to learn more about the 'demo scene', the internet art culture that produced these demos check out scene.org.

Some links to other real time raytracing projects: The Ray Tracing project at the Technical University of Ilmenau: This is a project where they are raytracing using a 3d graphics card. I think this is one of those raytracers where you send polygons to the graphics card whenever you find patches of solid color.
Interactive Ray Tracing Project at the University of Utah: A full software ray tracer, running on SGI hardware
The Avalon Project: Appears to be a group looking for investment to build a real time ray tracing graphics chip. There are some impressive screens there, but they were not generated in real time.
Spinning Kids: This is the site of a group of demo makers that made some of the more impressive early real time ray tracing demos.
OpenRT: An effort to make a standard real time raytracing API based on a real time ray tracer developed at Saarland University ( Germany ). Their technology is based on a hardware implementation. Here are a bunch of links related to that project:
Saarcor: A page dedicated to the Saarcor hardware that drives it,
inTrace: company that spawned off from it to commericalize it,
Sunflowers: Some impressive images generated using this system,
Saarland University Computer graphics group: That this all came out of.
enRay: A software real time raytracer for PC with source code. Interestingly its based on rendering complex implicit surfaces.
Programmers Heaven Raytracing Area: Code for a bunch of raytracing demos. Mostly software only for PC, some of them real time.