Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!taylor!markv From: markv@taylor.Princeton.EDU (Mark VandeWettering) Newsgroups: comp.graphics Subject: Re: Realtime Raytracing demo on a PC... Anybody wanna see? Keywords: Raytracing, Shading, Realtime Message-ID: <5359@idunno.Princeton.EDU> Date: 14 Jan 91 21:28:20 GMT References: <1991Jan8.072628.13689@tukki.jyu.fi> Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU Reply-To: markv@taylor.Princeton.EDU (Mark VandeWettering) Organization: Princeton University Lines: 30 >In <1991Jan8.072628.13689@tukki.jyu.fi> ap@tukki.jyu.fi (Patric Aalto) writes: >>Hi! >>I just finished a small demo I have been working on a couple of months. >>It performs real-time ray-tracing and shading (a sort of mixture of them >>both) on an IBM PC-compatible computer with VGA graphics. I find it pretty >>impressive (although the environment is pretty simple: It has a planet, >>a moon and a sun). It runs at 70 frames/second on my 80386/20 Mhz machine. Please, don't call it raytracing if it isn't raytracing. Caveat: I haven't seen this program, although I have read the discussions of it. When one speaks of raytracing, one generally means a renderer that works by generating view rays, and probing a data base of objects to find the closest one. The main advantage: shadows and reflections can easily (if not cheaply) be done within the same framework. Disadvantage: requires (possibly) accessing the entire database of objects for each pixel. It sounds like this demo does some highly optimized phong shading, which is nice, cute, interesting, but it AIN'T RAYTRACING. We have enough muddled terminology (like distributed raytracing) without calling everything that renders a raytracer. It just ain't so. Mark Mark VandeWettering markv@acm.princeton.edu