I would genuinely love to take you up on that. As part of our courses, we have everyone from complete newbies to semi-experienced professionals, so our first battery of courses is getting everyone up to speed on basic art. 2D concept drawing is kicking me right now, I’m now fully grasping how hard it is to generate good-looking light without an algorithm painting it in for you. Are you an artist in the industry?
And absolutely, check out ReSTIR and the derivative algorithms. It’s basically technology that can facilitate real-time path-tracing for many-light scenes (IE hundreds+) at less of a cost. I’ve read through the white paper a few dozen times and I still only understand so much, plus the algorithm’s been reworked a handful of times since its’ debut. Essentially? Low-noise path-tracing for about 2SPP, with options to scale up or down.
The gap is absolutely closing, and competitors are trying to catch up to Epic. Just a few days ago, Nvidia announced their micro-meshes system, which is based on an Adobe paper on displacement maps for ray-tracing plus some lessons from nanite and mesh shaders I believe. Unlike Nanite however, it can support partial opacity and ray-tracing against the raw geo. It’s also an open-standard, with mass adoption in mind. Cheap, real-time path-tracing against things with almost unlimited geometric detail is coming soon-ish, and how the industry will adapt will be a fascinating thing to see.
So yes, I do love the tech side of things. But with a chance to learn art, I’m really happy to challenge myself in new ways.