It’s been a while since I talked about Gaia on here – yes I’m still making progress, including what’s basically amounted to a complete rewrite. I’ll probably make a more detailed post about that at some point.
For now though I just wanted to show off some renders that I’ve made with Gaia over the last few months:
Firstly, a render of the Amazon Lumberyard Bistro scene, a test to see how well Gaia could cope with a large scene. There are a fair few artefacts in this shot – especially visible on the bike and road – which I believe are due to overlapping triangles.
This shot is of Lucy, a statue of a Christian angel scanned by Stanford University Computer Graphics Laboratory. The 3D model is huge at 28 million triangles, taking up over 11GB of RAM, with spikes up to 18GB while it’s being loaded (definitely something to optimise in the future…)
Another shot of Lucy – I particularly love the colour bouncing off of the walls in this one.
As part of the rewrite I removed the light sampling code, so for a while Gaia was limited to using a single, hard-coded light source. Having finally added a naïve light sampler back in, I of course had to test it out. I think there are ~150 light sources here.
Finally, I’m working on implementing the Autodesk Standard Surface. Step 1 of this is support for an Alpha channel, which I was testing here.
But of course, no render reel is complete without a blooper or two from the rewrite:
This was supposed to be a D20 but, as you can see, it didn’t quite come out that way. This turned out to be an AABB issue.
I almost didn’t want to fix this one as it’s kinda pretty, but this was supposed to be two Lambertian spheres. The transparency was a result of an intersection bug (duh) but I’ve still no idea what caused the brightness to the left of the spheres. I hadn’t even implemented lighting yet! Works fine now though so… yay?
