SGI: Computer Graphics

20fps... hats off to you... that looks like really rather awesome

Well, thanks but I guess that one goes to NVIDIA, the g80 series has endless shading power. Looks like we have to think about some new ways to burn it

Matthias

Unbelievable! g80 is an nv4x series GPU?

What is "dirt mapping", noise textures for gloss and diffuse?

G80 is the new 8th generation nVidia GPU (used in the 8800 series). Just came out a couple weeks ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G80

g70 = consumer 7800/7900 series (or quadro 4500/5500)
g80 = consumer 8800gts/8800gtx (at the moment). Since the GTX card is barely available, we did test it on the gts and imagine my face when I saw the model exactly followed every mouse gesture. I can't wait until I can test it on a gtx resp. the next generation of quadro cards with 1.5gb video memory that may be available in the first quarter of 2007



Another term for dirt mapping is ambient occlusion ( see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion ).

Matthias

Have made some additional shots within the interior. There are almost no texture coordinates used (except typical things like MMI interface and logos), everything is done with shaders. Reason is to be able to prepare a review session in less than a day once the geometry has been properly converted from the original CAD data. Most shaders (leather, rough plastic) have bump structures too. The dirt mapping I mentioned earlier has much more effect within the interior too, without it everything would look really flat and synthetic









Matthias

Give me a couple of weeks, and I should be able to try this.

Those interior shots look really nice; I like the subtle highlights and the way the sunlight wraps around the objects.

Can you drive the model around?

I like the two buttons just below the radio to the right of center. It looks like if you press them alternately the car would scratch your balls for you ...

This is a special feature of the chinese edition ...



Not yet, but we are working on it Interestingly we heard that comment quite a lot during the exhibition. Seems even if the visualization isn't physicaly correct it is more than plausible for joe average ...

Next stop ... realtime raytracing

Matthias

you would like to see this on an IR4 do you have a benchmark that can be run?? id be interested to see just how powerful things have become over the past few years... GFX cards have evolved so quickly its scary!! - can a near silent beige desktop equal the KW consuming 7 foot monster of a few years back!!!

no chance to get this running on sgi iron ... even ati cards fail for various reasons (no hdr filtering yet, gl state trashing, weird optical results and last but not least undefined crashes).

Matthias

Brombear,

Once again you put my best efforts to shame. Very, very nice!

Squeen,

your welcome, positive comments from people working in the same domain are always a special pleasure.

So, decided to put up a new image. If anyone here is at the hannover fair in germany next week, you could see our software (and me) live at the PNY boost (Hall 17 F60). We are showing the car within the picture on a 4 segment mono powerwall driven by a cluster of 4 pc with quadro FX4600 (FX5600 not yet available). Special features are image quality (high antialiasing quality in combination with our material shaders) and speed.



Matthias

Hi there,

just wanted to give a small update that we are still alive and founded a new company together with some 3D guys from berlin. Our new name is PI-VR GmbH and you'll find our website at http://www.pi-vr.de We are now also targeting automobil photographers and the first results can be seen within our gallery.

In the meantime we have extended our raytracer a lot, added some nice features to the OpenGL renderer (geometry lights, ultra high anti-aliasing), added a CAD interface and some things for marketing production rendering ( rendering layers, automated generation of images, etc.) and various other things that I might have forgotten. Even the ATI part of our OpenGL rendering does work now and the new FireGL 7700/8700 rocks like nothing else.

We also have a new product called VservR which is an online server based realtime 3D configurator.

So even if this is good news, there are some bad to share also. Nothing of this will work on your O2 nor your Octane/Fuel and not even on any kind of Onyx

Matthias

Don't let that stop you showing your work off though It really is most impressive.

Good luck with your new company.

Some time has passed by and I would like to invite those that attend the hannover fair (20-24.04.2009 in hannover/germany) to join us at the shared booth of pny/nvidia/3dconnexion/cad.de (hall 17 booth F60)

We will showcase a very detailed model of a car consisting of 60 million polygons with a development version showing our global illumination implementation. Some images may be seen at our website already.

Regards

Matthias

At what point does it get to be easier just to make the car and take a photo ?

A very good question ... coming from the visualization neadnertal times on onyxes with 120.000 polygons I often ask this myself. But our clients always see potential for improvement. It's just a question how near you want to go.

Speaking of limits ... we just have the limits of the main memory ... current nehalem workstation hardware supports up to 192GB. Our biggest model was 550 Million Polygons using 54GB main memory (all geometry, textures and hdr environments), so if I simply interpolate we should be able to visualize somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion polygons ... should be enough for airplanes ...

but not enough for industrial complexes like a steel work ... I guess you would need another 10-100-1000x increase in memory

Speaking of photos ... most of the time the car is not there as physical prototype ... too early in engineering process and of course the rising variety of possible configurations of a car or whatever.