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Fovotec develops new version of FovoRender for Intel® OSPRay

October 13, 2022

Fovotec is very excited to announce the start of a new integration of FovoRender into Intel’s OSPRay, a next generation ultra-realistic path tracing based renderer. Intel® OSPRay is an open source, scalable, and portable ray tracing engine for high-performance, high-fidelity visualisation on Intel architecture CPUs.


The purpose of OSPRay is to provide an open, powerful, and easy-to-use rendering library that allows one to easily build interactive applications that use ray tracing based rendering (including both surface- and volume-based visualisations). OSPRay (today) is completely CPU-based, and runs on anything from laptops, to workstations, to compute nodes in HPC systems, and in the cloud. In the future, OSPRay will also support GPUs as part of oneAPI cross-architecture programming efforts.


It is clear that OSPRay brings some really interesting new possibilities to 3D rendering and following an initial meeting to learn more with Bruce Cherniak, an Intel ray tracing software engineer, at SIGGRAPH 2022. Then, Fovotec set to work looking at the compatibility and potential integration of the FovoRender processes within this exciting new host platform. 

While there is some way to go to develop a final FovoRender version, below are some of the first proof of concept image compositions created with an initial version of FovoRender for OSPRay. These renders are designed to demonstrate how the FovoRender spatial composition tools can be used by a 3D artist. For example, we show how to create a more natural-looking and spatially accurate render of the interior of a car, in this case a Volvo, than can be achieved with a standard linear render.


Images 1 and 2 below show a comparison between a shot created in Intel® OSPRay using a standard linear render and one created using the new trial integration of FovoRender for Intel® OSPRay with some custom settings. Both shots have a  horizontal field of view of around 120 degrees, of a model freely available on  sketchfab.com.

FovoRender was initially developed as a technology to run within the framework of the real-time rasteriser engines used in gaming; it has also been integrated into several GPU-based path tracer engines such as Cinema4D with Octane Render and the Unreal 4 path tracer rendering mode. This new integration into OSPRay demonstrates the versatility of the natural rendering process behind FovoRender in the new environment of an interactive CPU-based path tracer.  As a result, FovoRender combined with the ultra high-quality CPU rendering of OSPRay is now able to produce even more realistic and immersive images, all based on modelling the structure of human vision. 

 

“The ease with which Fovotec enabled its FovoRender technology within Intel OSPRay exemplifies how high-quality open source products can foster rapid innovation. These images highlight how FovoRender is addressing a common problem in standard rendering and photography where distortion occurs with wide fields-of-view. This Intel and Fovotec collaboration helps bring images with much higher perceptual quality to a wider audience.” says Cherniak.


Fovotec is constantly evolving its technology and patent protected IP to keep up with trends and market insight to create better processes for 3D rendering. Our aim is to enable end users to create more  immersive and higher perceptual quality images.


 Find out more:


·   FovoRender - www.fovotec.com

 

·   Intel® OSPRay can be downloaded individually from GitHub, or as part of the Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit (Render Kit), which includes a suite of advanced ray tracing libraries. OSPRay builds on top of Intel® Embree and Intel® ISPC (Implicit SPMD Program Compiler), which are part of the Render Kit package. 


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