
Caustic Graphics 100% Raytracing - mixmax
http://vimeo.com/4240520
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russell
Proud dad: my son is one of the three founders of Caustic. In the video James
(someone else's son :-) demonstrates the developer version done in FPGA. A 10x
version in custom silicon is due out next year.

The founders raised their nest egg by cashing in their Apple stock. They
created a software emulator and then raised $5.5M from angels, not VCs. They
did use a VC to find a CEO whose function was to raise the capital. He got no
salary and no stock until he got the funding. Even after funding the founders
still had control. Take heart, it's possible to do hardware, even these days.

~~~
anigbrowl
Well, you're right to feel proud.

It's a fine and refreshingly hype-light product. The only change I'd like to
see is a simple application included that takes a common 3d file format
(blender, pov or something) and spits out a rendered bitmap.

Instead of waiting for developers to add Caustic support to their 3d apps over
the summer, this would allow a 3d artist to start saving time tomorrow, even
knowing that that it wasn't optimized. The little app displayed in the video
demo would be more than sufficient, it just doesn't seem from the website like
it comes with any ready-to-use tools for the non-programmer.

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jrbedard
Impressive technology, they will certainly gain a lot of speed by turning
their FPGA architecture into a fixed chipset. This is the kind of
hardware/software that would be interesting to see in next generation
consoles. Video games production would require the same amount of
modelers/texturers/animators, but way less shader/graphic programmers as a lot
of the material hacks from the current GPU generation would be obsolete.

I've explored a bit with real-time raytracing on this project :
<http://www.jrbedard.net/projects/C/raytracer/raytracer.htm> It worked in
real-time with a simple scene and basics reflective/refractive materials. But
I had to rely on OpenGL speed up some of the transformations and blitting.
Trying to fit raytracing on current generation GPU/APIs is a pain and feels
like a hack, even with Cuda. Their product seem to resolve that problem of
more easily reaching photo-realistic real-time performance.

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pmjordan
Very cool. Does anyone know what level of global illumination they are able to
reach? I noticed they did have an ambient occlusion setting which produced
some noisy-looking shadows (though that could've been a video artifact).
Obviously difficult (i.e. highly indirect) lighting situations will seriously
impact the framerate, but it would still kick ass if they could hardware
accelerate it. Given that they use GLSL to define their surface properties,
I'd be interested in how they figure out where to cast their random rays.

Baking this into an ASIC instead of an FPGA would be awesome. But I'm sure
they're already onto that.

