SIGGRAPH2009: A talk with Caustic

The Software (User Side)

With the new announcement, Caustic now has a huge volume of user-side software available.  Now if you own a Caustic Card, you can get real-time raytracing in Autodesk Showcase, Lightworks Artisan, Rhino, and other tools.  For an impressive example of this look at the podcast where I see the Lightworks Artisan demonstration.

Lightworks builds visualization tools for other systems to drop-in, allowing other vendors to offer state-of-the-art visuals without needed to build it themselves.  In the Artisan demo, they take the example of a CAD product.

• At the bottom, you can imagine your classic CAD display: Basic OpenGL rendering, flat shading, visible edges, overlaid with measurements and data.
• At the top, you could see your CausticOne display:  High-detail rendering with reflections and shadows, and fully interactive.

While the CausticOne won’t replace a full ray-tracing solution (like mental ray), it’s a great intermediate step between wireframe/lowres and the high-end stuff, that can now be run real-time and interactively.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Graphics, Hardware, Science caustic, feature, siggraph