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>Is writing one a particularly challenging thing to do? I wrote a simple ray tracer for a college project in the 90s so I would tend to say that part of the no
by chasingthewind 8y ago
>Is writing one a particularly challenging thing to do?
I wrote a simple ray tracer for a college project in the 90s so I would tend to say that part of the novelty is that it's actually quite easy to write a very basic ray tracer and get cool looking images :)
- repsilat 8y agoFunny, I bet more people know how to raytrace a sphere in software than know how to rasterise a polygon these days. Neither is terribly hard (or terribly useful, to the average dev.)
- fyi1183 8y agoTo be fair, raytracing a sphere is easier than raytracing triangles. Even a single triangle is harder than a sphere, but with a triangle mesh you can't avoid thinking about acceleration structures and having a watertight intersection test, which includes worrying about floating point precision issues. So what you're saying may be less about raytracing vs. rasterization and more about spheres vs. triangles.
- grkvlt 8y agoExactly. And, similarly to fractal rendering, it's also the fun of using what is essentially pure mathematics (3-D geometry, algebra, matrices, etc.) to generate pretty images.