What is Brigade Engine?

It seems that a lot of people are not understanding what is really Brigade, the engine I am doing pictures with.
So I’m going to type something about it.

First, Brigade is in real-time, it’s an engine for video games. It uses path tracing to render the image; instead of rasterisation like every other 3D games.

Brigade uses path tracing, which is an extension to the ray tracing algorithm capable of producing photorealistic images. It traces many rays (samples) per pixel in random directions, and then takes the average value to calculate the final color of each pixel.

Whenever a ray hits a surface, a new ray is traced from that hitpoint in a random direction until the max path depth is reached or until a Russian roulette-like mechanism kills the ray.
This way, path tracing is able to produce effects like diffuse color bleeding, glossy (blurry) reflections, true ambient occlusion, soft shadows, caustics, true depth of field, etc.

It can simulate every known material including participating media like fog, god rays and clouds and materials with sub-surface scattering for example.

Everything is physical & calculated right. No hacks whatsoever are used to create effects; I think that most of you are aware for example of Depth Of Field in random games that are just depth hacks; that’s why we have so many difficulties to apply it right or the edges are somewhat messy, doesn’t blur the alpha materials, etc…

Well, with Brigade. The artist or game designer can imagine whatever he wants without restrictions in terms of rendering, no need for hacks/ pre-bake maps (Mirror’s edge used pre-baked lighting to look so good).

Brigade brings CGI rendering to video games, and that’s why I’m very enthusiast about it. Because it runs amazingly well & it’s still in early stages.

You can check some screenshots here : https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.471466862887799.111426.198351220199366&type=3

And I’ll post some videos later here too, in my Facebook page or blog.

Thanks to Sam Lapere for helping me with the path tracing description.