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From: rhbartels@watcgl.UUCP (Richard Bartels)
Newsgroups: net.graphics
Subject: Re: Wave-front ray tracing?
Message-ID: <392@watcgl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Mar-86 09:22:22 EST
Article-I.D.: watcgl.392
Posted: Tue Mar  4 09:22:22 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Mar-86 03:59:00 EST
References: <13300001@ccvaxa>
Reply-To: rhbartels@watcgl.UUCP (Richard Bartels)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 20
Summary: 

In article <13300001@ccvaxa> aglew@ccvaxa.UUCP writes:
>
>Query: might not wave-front type computations be more efficient?
>.....
>Has this been tried as an alternative to ray-tracing? Any references?
>

One reference is: H. P. Moravec -- 3D Graphics and the Wave Theory,
		  Computer Graphics, Vol. 15, No. 3, Aug. 1981,
		  pp. 289-296 (SIGGRAPH '81 Proceedings)

The result seems to be that you get pictures 1000 times worse for
10,000 times the complexity and effort, as witness the fact that
there don't appear to have been any follow-up articles.

As a side remark: I have a friend who works from time to time in
the optics industry designing lenses.  They use ray-tracing, mainly,
rather than wave-front calculations.  There must be a reason.

-Richard Bartels