(no subject)

[andrewducker]

Quake 3 with raytracing.

There's a downloadable video which is pretty, but to do it yourself you'll need 20-PCs working together (and that's to get 20FPS).

Comments

[andrewducker]

Ray Tracing is where you start with the virtual 'eye' and send beams of light out into the world, working out exactly where they'd hit in order to decide what colour they'd produce if they were coming the other way. It's the most realistic way to generate a 3D image.

Sadly it's very computationally expensive and the various other shortcut methods that are used produce images that are now really rather good themselves at a fraction of the 'price'.

More here: http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/raytrace/rtrace0.htm