4 ms·
> However, for live-action film and architectural visualization projects where photorealism is valued over performance, ray tracing gives an extra level of fide
by electricslpnsld 8y ago
> However, for live-action film and architectural visualization projects where photorealism is valued over performance, ray tracing gives an extra level of fidelity that is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with rasterization.
Don't essentially all modern production renderers use path tracing? Mental Ray was the last 'major' renderer I know of that used ray tracing, and it was discontinued a few years back.
- skykooler 8y agoWhat is the difference between path tracing and ray tracing?
- electricslpnsld 8y agoRoughly speaking, ray tracing shoots rays from the camera frustum, bounces them off geometry, and sees what lights they hit. Path tracing is Monte Carlo integration of the rendering equation. [0] It is easier to get soft shadows and global-illumantion-like effects with a path tracer. I remember reading articles circa 2013/2014 about Pixar moving to a path-tracer, which significantly reduced the amount of time they had to spend manually tuning lights and hacking in shadow effects, etc. [0] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-ray-tracing-and-path-tracing https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-ray-traci...
- vernie 8y agoIt's important to note that Pixar wasn't moving away from a ray tracer, but from a rasterization-based renderer.
- petermcneeley 8y agoThese terms tend to be used interchangeably. In the context of your original quote I think path tracing is the more accurate term. Even Arnold Renderer is described as a raytracer. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_(software) )
- electricslpnsld 8y agoPoking around there does seem to be a fair amount of overloading of the term! Even Arnold's website jumps between using ray tracer [0] and path tracer [1]. [0] https://www.solidangle.com/arnold/ https://www.solidangle.com/arnold/ [1] https://www.solidangle.com/about/ https://www.solidangle.com/about/
- seanalltogether 8y agoI would assume any good path tracer is a good ray tracer as well. If you start with a simple deterministic ray trace you can probably layer on a path tracer that doesn't require as many samples to produce a good image that's fast.
- dahart 8y agoI like to see "path tracing" as a higher level rendering algorithm built on top of ray tracing, and "ray tracing" as a visibility query in a scene using a straight line. Ray tracing is more of a computational primitive that can be used for direct lighting, or for reflections, or for global illumination, or if you want, even for simulating audio. Note that "path tracing" is also overloaded, some people use it to mean any ray tracing that does global illumination, but the term also refers to a stricter definition which is an algorithm that integrates lighting in n-dimensional path space. A path tracer under that latter definition doesn't do any branching along a path, instead it builds complete paths from camera to light to calculate the contribution to a pixel. This is where the name came from.
- shaded-enmity 8y agoThe main differentiator here is that this is able to deliver real-time performance at 24 fps -- not much interesting to current PC gaming standards (I'd trade detail quality for 144fps any day), but I guess that this has a huge potential for next gen console gaming.
- mtgx 8y agoWhy didn't the gaming industry go with path tracing anyway? How much more performance does path tracing need compared to ray tracing, if all else is equal?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]