Well, it appears that these trade-offs may be fading away at last as NVIDIA’s new Iray 2015 technology can help bring instant photorealism to your renders and simulation.
What is Ray Tracing?
When it comes to ray tracing, there’s little hidden behind the name. Built with the sole purpose of creating more photo-realistic images, ray tracing produces a high quality render by progressively “tracing” the path light would take through a scene. To achieve a high-quality realism, including the effects produced by reflections, diffusion, depth of field and other anomalies, ray-tracing algorithms extend virtual rays of light from a render’s vantage. As a result ray traced images can achieve the same visual effect of professional photographs.
London’s “Walkie Talkie” Transforms Into Death Ray
Take London’s 20 Fenchurch Street tower as a case-in-point.
Known to Londoners as the “Walkie-Talkie,” this glass-ensconced building has long been controversial among residents and architects alike. While critiques of the building have varied widely, one thing’s for sure—no one appreciates the “death ray” it’s been generating since it arrived.
Built with sweeping curves that make the Walkie-Talkie contort like a barrel chested strongman, 20 Fenchurch is the ideal platform for concentrating solar energy. In fact, on good days, when the light’s just right, it can fry an egg on the nearby pavement. At it’s worst the Walkie-Talkie also has the power to melt the interior of a Jaguar XJ (which it actually has done).
But 20 Fenchurch isn’t the only building in the world to fall victim to its own designs. Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall has also been singled out for its solar harnessing properties and so have buildings in Las Vegas and other metropolises.
So what’s causing all of these buildings to act like Hollywood-style death-rays? Well, it really boils down (apologies!) to just a few things.
First, buildings are increasingly clad in glass. Second, that glass is increasingly built into complex curves. Finally, architects and civil engineers have struggled to find a way to accurately simulate the solar effects of their shimmering and sweeping structures.
Learning How Not to Build a Death Ray
By now you likely know where this is going. If a building is capable of concentrating light rays into a car melting, food-cooking beam, then couldn’t designers and architects use ray tracing techniques to simulate how a building would reflect light?
Until recently, that wasn’t really possible.
In the past, ray-tracing techniques were far too slow to integrate into an iterative workflow. But now, NVIDIA’s newest release, IRAY 2015, is allowing designers to tap into the power of their GPUs with a simple plugin that works with a number of popular CAD tools.
With GPUs at their side, designers can render images in real time. With that real-time photo-realistic (and in this case photon-realistic) feedback, renders can be used to view how a light will concentrate when reflected off a glass structure. In the future, simulations like these could prevent design flaws that we’re once thought to be unforeseeable.
What’s more, as simulations across the engineering and science disciplines become more robust, Iray and similar technologies, once used solely for graphics, might take on a leading role in engineering simulation.
Source: NVIDIA