Real-time PathTracing with global illumination and progressive rendering, all on top of the Babylon.js WebGL framework. Click here for Live Demo: https://erichlof.github.io/Babylon.js-PathTracing-Renderer/Babylon_Path_Tracing.html
Note: by request of Babylon.js users, this is a W.I.P. conversion from using three.js as the host engine to using Babylon.js as the host engine behind my custom path tracing shaders.
To see how this all this got started and to follow future progress, take a look at this Forum Discussion
As it is May the 4th today (Star Wars day), this 'base is not yet fully operational', but will be soon! ;-D
-
May 7th, 2021: Success! With the awesome help and guidance from Evgeni_Popov on the Babylon.js forum, I now have the pixel history working correctly. This means that when the camera is still, our Babylon.js Pathtracing Renderer continually samples the stationary scene over and over, all the while averaging the results. After a couple of seconds, it converges on a noise-free result. And since we are following the laws of physics and optics, this result will be photo-realistic! Many thanks again to Evgeni_Popov on the awesome Babylon.js forums for providing helpful examples and pointing me in the right direction. Now that this project is off the ground, we can fly! :-D
-
May 5th, 2021: I usually like figuring stuff out, but at this point I need help! The issue is that if you take a look at my 'Babylon_Path_Tracing.js' setup file in the 'js' folder, you can see that I have tried unsuccessfully to create a Babylon postProcess feedback loop, also known as a ping-pong buffer. The general concept is that you render(ray trace) a full screen noisy image with my custom fragment pixel shader ('pathTracing.fragment.fx' in 'shaders' folder) using the usual Babylon PostProcess, then copy/save all those pixels (can either be done with Babylon's PassPostProcess or as I have tried here with my custom tiny shader called 'screenCopy.fragment.fx' in 'shaders' folder. Then the trick is I need to be able to use the first pathTracing postProcess on the next animation frame and 'read' from the output of the screenCopy postProcess, essentially reading its own history (or giving it a short-term pixel 'memory' of what it calculated last frame). When this is correctly implemented, I will be able to blend each current image with the previous history image, which will refine the image over time thorugh sampling and averaging, and therefore the images settles down from an initial noisy state to a smooth, converged state. If you have an idea how to do this correctly with Babylon, please post on the Babylon Forum linked to above, or you can open an issue here on this repo. Thank you!
-
May 4th, 2021: The first commit, project repo created.