No clue how feasible this is, but it seems Nvidia has open sourced a very impressive Global Illumination implementation which performs well in real time.
Would something like this ever make it into TD?
Or otherwise a more general implementation of GI?
This is for instance a really good looking open source render engine that’s made for learning purposes which covers a bunch of features we’re currently lacking in TD.
It looks like both of those repos are no-go for TD.
Rtxgi, although vulkan, relies on Nvidia graphic cards, that means no support on Mac.
The second link is writen for the opengl API, so no luck with modern TD.
Rtxgi could be build into a windows only custom plugin, not an easy effort though.
At this point we have several operators that rely on Nvidia cards though. Given its the industry standard its not entirely unthinkable to use RTXGI.
It would surely be amazing to have some GI solution like this available in TD, but since things are moving forward very fast in this area I kinda feel like there will always be new (faster, more optimized and closer to ground truth) techniques - making it hard for TD to keep up with the state-of-the-art. Maybe it would be better to step back a little and rather consider looking at more future-proof solution like USD and Hydra delegates?
I mean, I feel like it would be just amazing to have access to the latest and most modern renderers (which have hydra render delegate). This way could TD leverage all the hard work done by other people in this area.
For example imagine TD would write scene delegate to represent TD’s scene graph for hydra (just like Foundry’s Nuke did it) - allowing any hydra render delegate to render current TD scenes. Surely there are TD concepts that wouldn’t be supported in this (for those there would still be an option to use normal Render TOP), but overall it could provide great future platform to build upon. What do you think about it?