AcademySoftwareFoundation
MaterialX WebGL Path Tracer
Now that the MaterialX Web Viewer is available for quick validation of MaterialX content in the browser, an especially valuable next step would be the contribution of a WebGL Path Tracer that generates corresponding path-traced renders.
One potential starting point for this project is the three-gpu-pathtracer by Garrett Johnson, which provides the fundamental building blocks for path-traced rendering using Three.js.
Another good role model is the OpenPBR Viewer by Jamie Portsmouth, which places a strong emphasis on physical accuracy in rendering, and uses the Standard Shader Ball for consistency with offline renders.
this is a great idea. The path-traced rendering using Three.js is astoundingly good.
It would even be used as a Render farm ?
Maybe a first attempt to use the ThreeJS renderer is to take Jamie's code and encapsulate it into an appropriate Javascript shader like this one
I didn't see any examples with pattern graphs but maybe a custom code generator which produces such shaders would worth investigating ? In any case trying this could help drive changes in the code gen framework to produce code / functions suitable for a path-tracer.
This is a very good idea and would like to provide help on it. I have a question regarding shader compilation time and performance.
Wouldn't be WebGPU more suited for creating a path tracer ? I recon it could lead to a substantial development, but for example the openPBR viewer is truly impressive but take a long time to compile and is performance heavy for my side (RTX 2070 + Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core + 16 Go ram).
In any case, I will try to put @kwokcb idea to the test by encapsulating OpenPBR viewer shaders into a Jamie's code.
