4 ms·
Poking 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]
by electricslpnsld 8y ago
Poking 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.