Jungle Ruins is a research-driven scene designed to address multiple real-time path tracing challenges in a unified, large-scale natural environment inspired by the Amazon rainforest
The project consolidates high-frequency detail, massive instancing, and alpha testing into a single workload to analyze their complex interactions
High-frequency detail in dense geometry creates aliasing and denoising challenges, especially with limited samples per pixel
Massive instancing, with millions of vegetation instances, stresses memory and acceleration structure management, requiring efficient BLAS and TLAS handling
Alpha testing for vegetation opacity is computationally expensive, increasing memory access and ray traversal time; fully modeled geometry can exceed triangle and memory budgets
The scene’s workflow included conceptualization, research, modular asset building, and procedural generation, balancing artistic goals with technical constraints
Terrain was created as an 8Kx8K procedural landscape, divided into 64 tiles for efficient scattering, control, and viewport responsiveness
Vegetation assets were modularly designed, with atomic components reused across plant groups, and procedural node trees enabled rapid variation
Blender was used as the central application for asset import, scene composition, and precise foliage scattering, leveraging full-resolution geometry
Real-time path tracing enabled accurate dynamic lighting, simplified asset authoring, and consistency between authoring and final render