Icare3D

EPIC games just released two impressive videos presenting their new UE4 game engine featuring real-time global illumination that supports diffuse and specular bounces on dynamic scenes.

According to this interview of Tim Sweeney, their technique is called SVOGI (Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination) and... it is based on the voxel cone-tracing technique we published last year at Pacific Graphics ! :-D

That's really awesome to see research results being used so quickly in a game engine ! Beyond the paper, you can find more details about our voxel cone-tracing approach in my GTC 2012 talk, my Siggraph talk, as well as in my Ph.D thesis on GigaVoxels.

This week I gave a talk at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference about a fast sparse voxelization technique that I worked on at NVIDIA in the context of my real-time global illumination approach (using voxel cone-tracing inside a sparse voxel octree).

Slides: (PPTX, 50MB), (PDF, 7MB)

Video (if you want to enjoy my french accent): http://www.gputechconf.com/

In this talk I first give an overview of the real-time GI approach, before quickly detailing the new GPU voxelization and octree construction algorithm.