CentiLeo: a brand new interactive out-of-core CUDA path tracer for massive models

Wow, the real-time GPU path tracing goodness just keeps on coming! I've barely recovered from the fantastic real-time path traced Kajiya scene by Jacco Bikker and Jeroen van Schijndel, and now I stumbled upon another hugely impressive interactive GPU path tracer, called CentiLeo, which is able to render massive models (such as a stripped down Boeing 777 model containing 370 million polygons) interactively with global illumination on just 1 GTX 480 using out-of-core GPU path tracing (3-10 frames per second at 1024x768, 1 sample per pixel with 1 GI bounce from an HDR image).

A twelve-minute video in HD of this amazing renderer in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxx9dyPO0js

Some screengrabs of the video with more info:

The planned features sound extremely exciting and seem to be aimed at production rendering with among other things bidirectional path tracing, Metropolis light transport, hair and displacement mapping:

All these features will be CUDA based according to the author of the video (see youtube comments):

"the target is CUDA implementation because it is fast and flexible enough. BDPT, MLT, tesselation, displacement mapping, hair/fur, texture filtering - sure, will be CUDA-based.

Programmable materials can be done in CUDA. But an additional idea would be to port some existing CPU/C++ material shaders to work with our GPU compute building blocks. Voxels are not yet planned. But they can be potentially implemented.

Our goal is to finish the TODO feature list by September 2011. The concepts are pretty simple, but all the devil is in details. The future work is engineering. Almost all research was already done.

The website will be created this or next week. This demo shows what we can do now."

The holy grail for game graphics:

This tech would be an ideal fit for rendering huge voxel data sets stored in a sparse voxel octree at interactive rates with high-quality global illumination. Definitely something to keep an eye on in the future.