Summary
This article explores the integration of ray tracing in Substance, a 3D texturing and material creation tool. It discusses how NVIDIA’s RTX technology has been incorporated into Substance to speed up baking processes and enhance real-time rendering capabilities. The article delves into the technical aspects of ray tracing, its benefits for game developers, and how Substance users can leverage this technology.
Bringing Real-Time Ray Tracing to Substance
NVIDIA’s RTX technology has been a game-changer in the graphics industry, offering real-time ray tracing capabilities that were previously unimaginable. When Sébastien Deguy, founder of Substance, first learned about NVIDIA’s RTX initiative, he described it as the biggest revolution in graphics for the next 10 to 20 years. This article explores how Substance has integrated RTX technology to transform its baking and rendering processes.
Accelerating Baking with RTX
Substance Designer has been updated to take full advantage of RTX technology. The new RTX-powered bakers offer unparalleled speed, reducing baking times from several minutes to just a few seconds. This significant speedup is achieved by leveraging the Tensor Cores in NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs for real-time inference and AI features like automatic delighter and shadow removal.
To integrate RTX technology, the Substance team had to make several architectural changes in the bakers. These changes not only enabled RTX acceleration but also laid the groundwork for future integrations of other technologies that will further improve performance and broaden hardware support.
The Power of Ray Tracing
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates the physical behavior of light by tracing the path of light from the view camera through the 3D scene and back to the light sources. This process allows for the creation of physically accurate reflections, refractions, shadows, and indirect lighting, making it invaluable for both real-time and non-real-time graphics applications.
How Ray Tracing Works
Ray tracing works by shooting rays from the camera through each pixel in the image plane and testing if these rays intersect with any primitives (triangles) in the scene. If a ray hits a primitive, the distance along the ray from the origin to the primitive is determined, and the color data from the primitive contributes to the final color of the pixel. Rays can also bounce and hit other objects, picking up color and lighting information from them.
Benefits for Game Developers
For game developers, ray tracing offers a way to achieve high-quality graphics with good frame rates. By combining rasterization and ray tracing, developers can render scenes with physically accurate reflections, refractions, and shadows. This hybrid approach is particularly effective in real-time applications where performance and visual fidelity are critical.
Accessing Substance
New users can try out the entire Substance Suite, including Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and Substance B2M, for free for 30 days. After the trial period, individual users can subscribe to the Substance Indie or Pro plans for $19.90/month and $99.90/month, respectively. These plans include 30 monthly materials from Substance Source. Students and teachers can request a license at no cost.
Technical Details
To enable GPU ray tracing in Substance, users need a compatible GPU (RTX family, Titan V, or GeForce 10xx), up-to-date GPU drivers, and Windows 10 ‘Fall Creator’ / October update (version 1809). Users can check their Windows version by clicking on the start menu, typing ‘winver’, and hitting the return key.
Supported Bakers
The following bakers in Substance take advantage of GPU ray tracing:
| Baker | CPU Raytracing | GPU Raytracing (DXR / Optix) |
|---|---|---|
| Ambient Occlusion | ■ | |
| Ambient Occlusion from mesh | ■ | ■ |
| Bent Normals from mesh | ■ | ■ |
| Color Map from mesh | ■ | |
| Convert UV to SVG | ■ | |
| Curvature | ■ | |
| Curvature from mesh | ■ | ■ |
| Curvature from mesh (deprecated) | ■ | |
| Height Map from mesh | ■ | |
| Normal Map from mesh | ■ | |
| Opacity Mask from mesh | ■ | |
| Position | ■ | |
| Position from mesh | ■ | |
| Thickness Map from mesh | ■ | ■ |
| Transferred Texture from mesh | ■ | |
| World Space Direction | ■ | |
| World Space Normals | ■ |
Conclusion
The integration of ray tracing in Substance has revolutionized the baking and rendering processes, offering unparalleled speed and visual fidelity. By leveraging NVIDIA’s RTX technology, Substance users can achieve high-quality graphics with good frame rates, making it an invaluable tool for game developers and 3D artists. With its robust features and user-friendly interface, Substance continues to be a leading tool in the 3D texturing and material creation industry.