VANCOUVER — At the SIGGRAPH conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed The Speed of Light, a realtime cinematic experience using Nvidia’s Turing architecture, RTX technology and new Unreal Engine (unrealengine.com) rendering advancements, and featuring the Porsche 911 Speedster Concept. The forward-looking technology unveiled onstage is the culmination of a joint development effort to unlock offline-quality ray-traced rendering in a game engine.
"The Porsche 911 Speedster Concept is the first car to be visualized with interactive realtime ray tracing," explains Francois Antoine, director of HMI at Epic Games, and creative director and VFX supervisor on the project. "In concert with Nvidia we’re accelerating the adoption of realtime ray tracing across many industries.”
“Nvidia RTX technology is purpose-built to provide a generational leap in the quality of realtime computer graphics, and The Speed of Light perfectly demonstrates that we are delivering on our promises,” adds Tony Tamasi, SVP of content and technology at Nvidia. “With Unreal Engine it’s possible to create physically-accurate, realistic scenes that feature a level of fidelity and detail we’ve previously only been able to imagine.”
"Porsche's collaboration with Epic and Nvidia has exceeded all expectations from both a creative and technological perspective," says Christian Braun, manager of virtual design at Porsche. "The achieved results are proof that realtime technology is revolutionizing how we design and market our vehicles."
Porsche is known for experimenting with the most advanced design techniques, and Braun has always envisioned a pipeline featuring a single toolset at its core. The enabling of realtime ray tracing with ray-traced diffuse global illumination in Unreal Engine has made it possible for Porsche to visualize this latest concept car, which will be made available to consumers. The experimental realtime ray tracing features used to create The Speed of Light will be built into a future Unreal Engine 4 release to benefit the entire development community.
“When you see the quality of the cinematic, it’s remarkable to note that no baking or lightmaps were required. There is no precomputed lighting—it’s all fully dynamic for both objects and light,” says Antoine. “When we’re designing cars, we have to explore every option from every angle, and having the ability to review fully visualized renders in real time has completely transformed the way we ideate.”
Bringing dynamic global illumination and ray-traced lighting to Unreal Engine is a critical development for users who work with very large datasets, and the advancements will benefit creators in game development, filmmaking, architecture, design, manufacturing, AR/VR and simulation.