ray tracing beginner

Ideally you will have several rays per pixel and average the results together. This is known as antialiasing.

Antialiasing and Raytracing

[edited by - smart_idiot on November 22, 2003 1:24:24 PM]

if its that far away, its so small this is really not much of a problem anymore.

but AA is a solution to this, yes. but realize that raytracing is slow enough without AA enabled.

ive been thinking about beam-tracing myself (not a used term afaik, i made it up), where you cast a piramid shaped beam instead of a ray, and trace that. im not sure yet how that would work out though. the math would become quite more complex for sure.

quote:

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Original post by Eelco
if its that far away, its so small this is really not much of a problem anymore.

but AA is a solution to this, yes. but realize that raytracing is slow enough without AA enabled.

ive been thinking about beam-tracing myself (not a used term afaik, i made it up), where you cast a piramid shaped beam instead of a ray, and trace that. im not sure yet how that would work out though. the math would become quite more complex for sure.

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That''s an interesting ideea. The math of the tracing wouldn''t be so much more difficult, but the math for the collision would be. The piramyd could interect the corner of an object and would have to be split.

the way i had it in mind was to have a small imagebuffer, of say 16x16 pixels (powers of 2 in any case). then trace the beam. when it hits something, split up in four more beams until a beam is completely absorbed by a surface or the imagebuffer pixel level is reached. then do a normal ray.

this would do doable in logarithmic time, so if youd really like you could do 256x256 samples without too much speedloss.

the biggest problem i see with this though is, for example, how to reflect a piramid of a curved surface like a sphere. you can approximate ofcource but im rather sure there isnt an exact solution to such a problem.

Eelco this looks like an old algorithm for back culling called warnock culling. I don''t want to start another future of ray tracing, but maybe now with this powerfull cpu and gpu some algorithm thought to much lenghty might became a test filed for some new theory
P.S. sorry for my english i''m very tired this night :-))

i dont see what it was to do with back(-face i sopposed you mean) culling..