Will nVidia's New RTX / Turing Chip Put 3D Texture Artists Out of Work?

"If you've been watching the launch of the nVidia RTX / Turing," longtime 3D graphics artist Rodion Herrera recently told me, "one thing is going to be clear. There will be a lot of texture artists in the industry who need to shift their focus, or they will lose their jobs."

He's talking about the technology nVidia announced late last week (demo video from it above). And because there's many 3D graphics artists who regularly read New World Notes, I wanted to put his analysis out there for further conversation:

"Real time ray tracing means most scenes will be lighted naturally. Currently, some games hire texture artists to 'fake' shadowing and lighting (i.e. baked shadows), and there are specialists who are really good at this. In the future, a 3D game developer wouldn't really need a texture artist anymore--well, they would probably still need textures, but they don't need an artist to 'bake' lighting effects on them (or use normal/bump maps, which is also a form of fakery)... lighting is now 'natural' because of ray tracing that's available on the Turing chip. This is actually why it will change how games will be made."

And he believes it will change who is hired to make games: "If a company is flexible, of course those texture artists can be reassigned for other tasks, but if they were hired purely to do textured lighting and shadows, then in the future, they won't be needed anymore."

He believes nVidia's CEO more or less acknowledged this during the announcement:

"The CEO kept saying something along the lines of  'the artist doesn't need to focus on the textures anymore, he just drops the light he needs'. That's when I realized it.

"Take a piece of woven material, like say, a woven basket. Right now, the trick is either to fake shadows into weave, to make it look 3D... but in the last 5-10 years, they did something better... bump mapping. Now, with ray tracing, you don't even need bump maps, you just have to shape the actual fibers of the basket, and when you drop the light in a dynamic ray traced environment, all the natural shadows that appear on the weave will be there. Granted, there's more processing time with a more detailed 3D model of the weave, but then this is the future, where modern video cards can munch on a greater number of triangles per polygon--ergo, it's almost a non-issue anymore

"So I realized why he said 'the next generation of graphics is here' even if most of the people in the crowd were nearly unresponsive... because there was really little difference with what people were seeing! We already experience this, right now, because of the skill of 3D texture artists who do all the wonderful light and shadow baking, or prepare the bump maps for us."

Rodion believes texture artists won't immediately notice the changes to their career, but will in the next decade:

"I still think the 3D mesh artists would still need textures and bitmaps (if they can't do that themselves), so I think what will happen is that texture artists will initially have a lighter workload (i.e. they don't have to 'paint in' the faked shadows and highlights or render baked textures and bump/normal maps for a scene. But I really don't know what will happen to them when real time ray traced lighting becomes mainstream in games and virtual environments, say, 10 years from now."

What's your take on this, fellow 3D wonks?

Comments

[Adam]

I disagree - the switch to PBR a few years back basically meant that texture artists should no longer be painting in shadows/highlights already. If you're doing that, you're breaking the sophisticated lighting models in modern engines.

Arguably the time saved was now spent in producing a lot more maps - previously you had maybe bump/spec/diffuse, now you've got albedo/normal/depth/occlusion/roughness/metalness, as well as detail maps and more complex shader setups which might add things like bent normals and so forth.

I can't see these details getting pushed into meshes either - realtime raytracing still has poly limits on levels comparable to rasterisation; ray/triangle intersection tests are not free; and materials will still be a faster workflow than trying to model this all.

That said - the technology is evolving, modern texture artists are just as likely to be doing photogrammetry scans of real world objects as they are painting in details by hand, but I can't see their jobs going anywhere soon.