World’s first ray-traced PC game and movie to arrive in 2012

AMD kicked into high gear with its Fusion Rendering Cloud. A team lead by Jules Urbach, CEO of both OTOY and Lightstage is working hard on making a reality into a computer game and vice versa. During the ATI Evergreen briefing held on USS Hornet, Jules Urbach showed a 10 second clip from an upcoming manga movie, currently in development by Big Lazy Robot and a Japanese developer.

The 10 second scene starts with a bad guy launching some sort of attack… scene was ray-trace rendered in real time courtesy of AMD hardware that the teams have at their disposal.

We aren’t in liberty to disclose the title’s name nor the studio, but the clip shown from the movie looked absolutely brilliant – photo-realism at its best. However, the main reason for this story is not the anime movie itself, but the fact that the team is working on a computer game as well. For the first time in history, the game and the movie will be created using the very same digital assets and very same level of detail. All of this is a natural consequence of Lightstage [Yes, the picture on the homepage is the new Ruby for the ATI Evergreen generation], which in my opinion represents the revolution in digitalization of human characters, animals and the like. Lightstage [also lead by Jules Urbach] enables almost infinite fidelity in digitalization, with several hundred thousand of light combinations successfully penetrating even the human skin. After that, the mapping of a human character is a mountain to climb in terms of computing power needed, but with both ATI and nVidia both passing 1TFLOPS last year and on track to more than double that by the end of 2009.

Then, a sea of cars is driving on a highway until all of the sudden, asphalt starts to collapse…

Given the immense level of realism shown last year, on Radeon 4800 launch – when we saw Transformers teaser trailers rendered in real time using raytracing/voxel engine, there is no doubt in our minds that the shader power for upcoming Radeon 5000 series of cards played the lead role in making a decision to create a movie and an “interactive movie” i.e. PC game. With Fusion Rendering Cloud and upcoming OTOY game streaming service, this experience will be available for everyone.

…followed by chaos and frenzy, with cars being torn apart and some falling into the abyss.

The vision of offering you to play the movie your way directly after seeing it in cinema and taking it to a completely new ending is incredibly appealing to creative directors who want to create ultimate experience. Bear in mind that this Japanese anime project is just the start – as you can see in the pictures above, this anime movie is nothing like you’ve seen before.

Original Author: Theo Valich

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