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Description
I suppose everyone has played MineCraft by now. :) So have I, and I was wondering how MineCraft would look if you would keep the data, but replaced the renderer.
This screen shot has been generated using a stochastic ray tracer / path tracer, named Brigade. Brigade is the successor of my real-time ray tracer Arauna. Brigade uses the CPU and the GPU in tandem to generate high-quality images, using a skydome as the primary light source. This results in highly accurate lighting, with correct soft shadows.
Brigade is designed to run in real-time on high end hardware for modest game scenes. Since path tracing is a rather expensive process, renders shows quite some noise, especially while moving. As soon as the camera is stationary, the image converges to a smoother image.
The MineCraft scenery is read directly from a world folder. The voxel data is then converted to polygons, using an algorithm that attempts to create large quads (rather than a quad for each voxel surface), resulting in a 90% reduction. The scene used for the screenshots uses 62k triangles. This preprocessing obviously means that this is not suitable for realtime modifications to the landscape.
