In case anyone has about 30-60 minutes and is interested to get a quick glimpse of how easy (I guess meaning free and accessible at the least) it has become to do such graphics:
- Download and install Blender 2.71 (http://blender.org/download). On linux (Ubuntu) I did not even have to install it; I just extracted the tarball and ran the blender binary.
As someone who does not have graphics training, I was blown away when I did this. Apparently there is this thing called 'path tracing' based rendering, that takes care of accurate lighting, as long as you give the correct specification of geometry and materials.
Blender is an amazing piece of software; it's history goes back 20 years. I never worked with 3D before and was scared away by all of the claims that Blender was too difficult. However, recent versions (2.6 and 2.7) have a completely revamped interface that is much easier to understand. It's also skinnable and scriptable with Python.
There are so many great Blender tutorials on Youtube and Lynda.com has an excellent Blender essential training course.
I've tried to make a very rough inference based on John Carmack's statement along the lines "at one order of magnitude improvement on today's GPU's we'll start seeing it in real things, and at two orders of magnitude it'll get competitive in games" (http://youtu.be/P6UKhR0T6cs?t=1h4m30s).
Nvidia's Optix is built on top of their general purpose library, CUDA and it massively accelerates ray casts. People have been using this for gpu accelerates path tracers.
- Download and install Blender 2.71 (http://blender.org/download). On linux (Ubuntu) I did not even have to install it; I just extracted the tarball and ran the blender binary.
- Go through this two part ceramic mug tutorial (30-60 minutes): http://youtu.be/y__uzGKmxt8 ... http://youtu.be/ChPle-aiJuA
As someone who does not have graphics training, I was blown away when I did this. Apparently there is this thing called 'path tracing' based rendering, that takes care of accurate lighting, as long as you give the correct specification of geometry and materials.
Some interesting videos:
- Octane 2.0 renderer: http://youtu.be/gLyhma-kuAw
- Lightwave: http://youtu.be/TAZIvyAJfeM
- Brigade 3.0: http://youtu.be/BpT6MkCeP7Y
- Alex Roman, the third and the seventh: http://vimeo.com/7809605
Brigade is an effort towards real-time path tracing, and it's predicted that within 2-3 GPU generations, such graphics would be possible in games.