3 ms·
Well that's funny. Back around 1992 or so I picked up a copy of this book, in hardcover, from a local bookstore (Bookstar - remember them?) - still in plastic
by cr0sh 8y ago
Well that's funny.
Back around 1992 or so I picked up a copy of this book, in hardcover, from a local bookstore (Bookstar - remember them?) - still in plastic wrap.
I was like 19 and naive. I paid something like $80.00 for it.
Opened it up - tried to understand it - the math was well beyond my pay grade.
Still is.
It's been sitting on my shelf every since. Probably the worst book purchase I ever made; had it not been in plastic I could have at least leafed thru it to see that I wouldn't understand it. At the time, $80.00 was a lot for me.
Live and learn, I guess!
:)
- jacquesm 8y agoIn a nutshell, simplest form of raytracing: imagine a point where your eye sits behind the screen, throw lines from this point into the screen hitting each pixel dead center into the scene, check which objects you hit, how far away from the origin point that happens and sort by depth. Take the nearest one, render in color based on angle of incidence compared to lightsource. That's the very simplest form of raytracing that you could do, then you can add reflection and transparency and other niceties that lead to the splitting of the rays and a summation at each hit. This is actually reverse raytracing, forward raytracing starts from the lightsource, doing it backwards is an optimization because a lot of the light would end up hitting absorbing surfaces long before it would hit the plane of projection.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 8y agoFirst year college I bought a 500$ textbook on mathematics. Tried to read it for 10 years. Didn't learn a thing. Reddit thread on abstract algebra mentionned a title that was cheap on amazon (used). 5$ shipped from the US, unlocked everything I ever was struggling with on the subject. Weird right :)