Aurora: a real-time path tracing renderer that enables fast product visualizations

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Today, product teams lack agility in the design and review cycle. Teams are slowed down when a design must go through a rendering process to visualize the finished result, without which they cannot make informed decisions. To make the design and review cycle faster, we’re introducing an open source project called “Aurora”.

Aurora is an interactive path tracing renderer that leverages graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware ray tracing. As an interactive renderer, it supports rapid design iteration in a viewport. Aurora has a USD Hydra render delegate called HdAurora, which allows it to be used from a USD Hydra scene delegate within the USD ecosystem. Aurora relies on hardware accelerated raytracing; see the system requirements below. It aims to be functional across hardware vendors and operating systems.

Goals for Aurora

• Renders noise-free in 50 milliseconds or less per frame.
• Intended for design iteration (viewport, performance) rather than final frames (production, quality), which are produced from a renderer like Autodesk Arnold.
• OS-independent: Runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS.
• Vendor-independent: Runs on GPUs from AMD, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA.

Features

• Path tracing and the global effects that come with it: soft shadows, reflections, refractions, bounced light, and more.
• Interactive performance for complex scenes, using hardware ray tracing in modern GPUs.
• Autodesk Standard Surface materials defined with MaterialX documents, which can represent a wide variety of real-world materials with physically-based shading. Also, independent layers of materials are supported, which can be used to implement decals.
• Environment lighting with a wrap-around lat-long image.
• Triangle geometry with object instancing.
• A USD Hydra render delegate (HdAurora) and standalone sample application (Plasma).

... with new features and enhancements to performance and quality planned. This will include denoising with NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers, support for alternative material models, discrete light sources, and more.Path tracing and the global effects that come with it: soft shadows, reflections, refractions, bounced light, and more.

Contribute to Aurora

Aurora is developed and maintained by Autodesk. It is open source under the Apache license. Feature requests and contributions are welcome! Here's Aurora's Github: https://github.com/Autodesk/Aurora

Check out these images rendered in Aurora

Telescope Model by Roberto Ziche (inspired by Celestron products)
HDRI images from polyhaven.com
Autodesk Inventor assembly line model courtesy of ASKA

The technologists behind Aurora

Mauricio Vives is Senior Principal Engineer at Autodesk. He has contributed to support for shaders, materials, and visual effects at Autodesk. More recently, Mauricio created and has led the development of Aurora, a physically based real-time renderer that leverages GPU ray tracing. He has presented on physically based rendering at Autodesk TechX, SIGGRAPH I3D, and Nvidia GTC, and has been a technical reviewer for several graphics books. Mauricio is also a long-time user of Autodesk software, starting in 1990 with MS-DOS versions of AutoCAD, 3D Studio, and Animator.

Gareth Morgan is Senior Principal Engineer working on the Aurora real-time renderer. He has been at Autodesk since 2020. Prior to that, he developed renderers for over 20 years. His renderer research includes groundbreaking GPU ray tracing techniques. He has presented at Game Developer Conference, NAB, and Papers We Love, and written chapters in GPU Gems and GPU Zen books.

Andy Shiue is Principal Engineer at Autodesk. He joined the team of Aurora in 2022. He started his career developing GPU-based ray tracer in 2006, and continued on GPU-based rendering engines of various industrial applications. He has presented a paper on subdivision surface at SIGGRAPH, and color grading pipeline at Autodesk Tech Summit. He was also the main contributor of the subdivision method in Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL).

Learn about Autodesk at SIGGRAPH 2022. Also, check out other open source projects at Autodesk.

We'd like to thank the contributors to this blog:

Rudy Cazabon, Sr Product Manager, Graphics at Autodesk

Arunima Kumar, Communications Manager at Autodesk