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Wrote my first ray tracer at 15, wrote a demoscene realtime ray tracing tutorial at 17, am now 37 and have been writing ray tracers professionally for over 10 y
by pixelpoet 6y ago
Wrote my first ray tracer at 15, wrote a demoscene realtime ray tracing tutorial at 17, am now 37 and have been writing ray tracers professionally for over 10 years. Have also had the pleasure of teaching ray tracing to sort of everyone who'll listen (some went on to do PhDs, one became a lead gfx programmer on GTA 5, the 3rd most recent was 12 years old, ...), it's like a nerdy Jehovah's Witness / Monte Carlo Methodist Church.
It's been pretty great; realtime rendering gets all the hype, but offline rendering is where realtime is headed and this is a super exciting time with all this parallel computation around.
- dilap 6y agoI'm curious, what are the professional applications?
- pixelpoet 6y agoIndigo, Corona and Redshift Renderer.
- null0pointer 6y ago> offline rendering is where realtime is headed Curious what you mean by this. Just that realtime will start using more and more offline techniques as hardware speeds up? Or are you talking about pre-rendered scenes?
- pixelpoet 6y agoThere are techniques you can do with ray tracing that can't (efficiently) be done with rasterisation, and as the amount of hardware ray tracing power increases, it will make increasing sense to ditch the extremely complex rendering pipelines we have now and just do (relatively) simple ray tracing. Eventually desktop GPU drivers will emulate "old" rasterised games on ray tracing hardware.
- zenojevski 6y agoHow did you get started working on ray tracing professionally? Did you market yourself? Got noticed by somebody important? Started selling your own raytracer? Or maybe just apply somewhere?
- pixelpoet 6y agoHappened to move to New Zealand from South Africa, immediately met up with the Indigo Renderer guy whom I'd spoken to previously through my tutorials on an ancient website, in the FlipCode and cfxWeb days. The main thing is actually spending a lot of time writing ray tracers... you should write your first 5 ray tracers as quickly as possible :)