Cloud-based software house Otoy is adding the Brigade path-tracing engine to the GPU renderer set of its OctaneEngine rendering software and Orbx video codex. Brigade is a real-time rendering engine for video games. It uses path tracing to render images as opposed to rasterization, used in most other 3D game rendering engines. Path tracing is an extension of Otoy’s ray tracing algorithm. It simulates many light paths per pixel and takes the average value to calculate the final color of each pixel. Whenever a ray hits a surface, a new ray is traced from that hitpoint in a random direction until the maximum path depth is reached or until a Russian roulette-like mechanism kills the ray. As a result, Otoy says Brigade is able to produce effects like diffuse color bleeding, glossy (blurry) reflections, soft shadows, real area lights, true depth of field, and more. Brigade is a new real-time rendering engine for video games which uses path tracing instead of the more common rasterization. (Source: Otoy) Traditional path tracing engines take hours to render accurate environments or objects. Otoy says in one well-documented case, it took nearly 22 hours to render a few seconds of ray-traced crystal balls moving around a table. By comparison, Otoy says Brigade can take motion-captured characters in an environment with path traced lighting and real-time shadow casting and render it in real-time at 30-60 frames per second (fps). (...)
I was wondering where they got the funding for doing all that cutting edge development stuff.. by Octane sales alone?
Seems it's funded by Autodesk in a big part.. I hope they won't pull the plug now after the SolidAngle purchase (..or at least before they can stand on their own feet)
Cloud-based graphics rendering expert Otoy is reporting that Home Box Office and Discovery Communications have both taken an undisclosed equity stake in Otoy. The total of venture capital in the Los Angeles software vendor is now $101 million, at a reported valuation of $300 million. Otoy says the investment will be used to develop and distribute “original holographic content … across TV, mobile, web, social, and emerging wearable technologies such as virtual and augmented reality.” Entertainer Jon Stewart is already working with Otoy on content development. A statement released by Otoy includes a statement from Stewart: “Otoy is unbelievable! It’s a limitless mind-blowing platform. My dream is to someday understand how they did it!” Otoy founder and CEO Jules Urbach says the future of media “is not going to be restrained by a screen, nor consumed through monolithic apps or platforms. Otoy’s mission is to make holographic and immersive content a mass market proposition for consumers, artists, and publishers alike. A key part of this endeavor is unifying production and delivery of content across all possible endpoints, from HTML5, to TV and social, to wearables.”
