5 ms·
It's kind of interesting, it's supposedly about raytracer, but raytracers even existed back then. I think the code that was presenting him "typing" the raytrace
by takeda 6y ago
It's kind of interesting, it's supposedly about raytracer, but raytracers even existed back then. I think the code that was presenting him "typing" the raytracer code and then presenting it was really the harder part to do.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoIIRC we've had raytracers since the 60's since they're basically trigonometry and vector math, but due to limited memory computers at the time had it was never really used.
- enneff 6y agoI used to use an open source ray tracer called POV-Ray in the early nineties and it was pretty impressive. Here’s an example of an early scene you could render with it: https://amp.reddit.com/r/vintagecgi/comments/eswamt/chesspov_povray_sample_scene_1991_ville_saari/ https://amp.reddit.com/r/vintagecgi/comments/eswamt/chesspov...
- einpoklum 6y agoI did a few similar scenes using a software renderer I wrote - not a ray tracer, though - for a Computer Graphics class in the early 2000s. Except I used a painting by Jim Todd as background, named "What Price Victory": http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fmfAOCgGNJU/SQuCxkXJiRI/AAAAAAAAGEU/FMPyalj-Pwk/s1600-h/small_What_Price_Victory.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fmfAOCgGNJU/SQuCxkXJiRI/AAAAAAAAGE...
- benttoothpaste 6y agoI remember using povray too. Officially it required a 386 pc but it could be recompiled for 286, which is what I did. My PC had a IIT 2c87 coprocessor that had special 4x4 matrix multiply instructions, so of course I modified povray to take advantage of that.
- dr_zoidberg 6y agoThat matmul instruction seemed oddly specific, so I had to google that, and lo and behold, indeed there was such a thing! [0] Do you remember what kind of speed ups that thing gave you? I wonder if you could play to backport some modern AI algorithms to it and run them at reasonable speeds -- however being a 286 I imagine it'd be quite a challenge. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=RD0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq=2c87+matmul&source=bl&ots=hmrvoGQlhJ&sig=ACfU3U2lK4uMwWK-igqQqFLwjUkBQC94ug&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj4kaOs6qXuAhUxJrkGHTTTDDQQ6AEwAHoECAoQAg#v=onepage&q=2c87%20matmul&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=RD0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA89&lpg=P...
- benttoothpaste 6y agoI no longer remember the numbers but the speed ups were measurable. That FPU had 24 FP registers (as compared to 8 in a regular 287). The best case would be to load a matrix to the registers and then have a bunch of vectors to multiply the stored matrix with. Then this thing could fly. Loading the matrix to the registers was slow though because 287 coprocessors used DMA to communicate with memory.
- dragonwriter 6y agoLess active the last several years, but it's still around: http://www.povray.org/ http://www.povray.org/ https://github.com/POV-Ray/povray https://github.com/POV-Ray/povray
- ci5er 6y agoWell, the algorithm was developed in the 1600's, but I remember Turner Whitted's 1979 SIGGRAPH paper blowing me away. I mean, sure, they were slow, but before REYES, they were about the only solution to GlobIlum. (Forward from the lights and backwards from the camera - you could even do specular lighting!)
- pixelpoet 6y agoReyes isn't a global illumination algorithm, in fact it doesn't prescribe any kind of illumination at all. Global illumination was first described by Cindy Goral, Ken Torrance and Donald Greenberg in the constrained setting of diffuse reflectance in polygonal scenes; the first general GI algorithm, path tracing, was introduced in 1986 by James Kajiya. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosity_(computer_graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosity_(computer_graphics)
- ci5er 6y agoThe way I implement REYES, it does. But no doubt- Kajiya was the man.
- pixelpoet 6y agoI'm curious how you would solve the GI problem with Reyes; note that doing something like like photon mapping or radiosity isn't Reyes itself.
- ci5er 6y agoPhoton mapping. I've never gotten radiosity debugged properly. I tend to like Reyes as something that works for NURB tersellation for me than the triangle interpolation thing. It could be that I'm a lazy programmer that has trouble with textures using classic z-buff techniques.
- egypturnash 6y agohttp://www.etwright.org/cghist/juggler.html http://www.etwright.org/cghist/juggler.html - similar work from 1987 on an Amiga Realtime raytracing didn’t exist until recently but people have been dabbling with doing it at much slower speeds, and sequencing the resulting frames, for a long time.
- whereistimbo 6y agoThis webpage[0] claims that realtime raytracing has existed since 1995, demo can run on PC/MS-DOS [0]: http://www.realtimerendering.com/resources/RTNews/demos/overview.htm http://www.realtimerendering.com/resources/RTNews/demos/over...