Realtime Path tracing

Hello everyone !

As we've all noticed, the coming release of Unity 5 will make a huge step concerning graphics inside our favourite game engine.

But I've also discovered in the September 18, 2014 blog's post that Unity refers to path tracing. In my opinion, path tracing is going to be one of the coming rendering technology of our future.

There are already coming products like Brigade Engine that might be compatible with other game engines like Unreal Engine.

I would like to know more about the support of path tracing in Unity in the future, can you someone give me some precisions about this ?

Thank you !

 

Thank you for your answer @peteorstrike !

This is a good news, this will give real fast feedback for artists when they work with lighting, by the way, will this feature be available at runtime ? Again, this is a great solution but it's focused on lighting.

I mean, even if path tracing is related to light and really efficient at calculating GI stuff, it's also used to calculate refractions, caustics, reflection, etc... Is it also planned tu support those effects ?

 

The path tracing unity is mentioning at the moment is only for the editor , for a noise free result is much to slow.
I have seen ray traced shadows / reflection but that about the limit you can go without making it ugly or slow.

 

I think that we can't consider path tracing as a coming feature.

 

A nice feature would be to offer path tracing for relections and refractions.

 

The only platform that would benefit from that would be the pc... and there are many other parts of unity who need more love then this.
I think currently the pc of a average person is not strong enough to handle something like this.
Maybe the Screen Space Ray-Traced Glossy Reflections do the trick for you.
http://www.livenda.com/candela_ssrr.html

 

You're right, Screen Space Reflections are great even if it has some limitation, but I think that handling path tracing on mobile is feasible with limited bounces and some tricks.

 

I'm courious whether unity consider make full dynamic enlighten for full dynamic geometry which will coexist with other options (baked, dynamic for static geom) in future too. We actually know only that unity working on pseudo-dynamic geometry (like room with door) and this is planned for 5.1 and later we probably will have option for bake enlighten on procedural content but we could bet that this will be expensive and this will be cool for only very rare changeable things (like chunks in procedural world)...

if it will be possible then this will be awesome because, in that case, we could use specific optimization per object (enlighten with pre-bake systems for static geometry, procedural enlighten with systems and bake in runtime for procedural, made once things and, finally, enlighten - systems and baking free - for full dynamic geometry)

 

Imagination Technologies' PowerVR video cards that are coming out now (right now) provide a fast hardware-based method for realtime ray tracing; so if Unity is already integrating Imagination's stuff in the editor, why wouldn't it be included for use in applications as well? Unity needs to allow something like this, or be left behind.
I would add that this technology is already being incorporated into new iPhones, so it'll work with mobile devices rather than just PCs.
Here's a video of the PowerVR video card doing realtime raytracing: