3 ms·
I've forgotten most of the specific matrix multiplication stuff I needed to know to write a ray tracer, and my ray tracer was dog slow compared to pixar's rende
by smolder 2y ago
I've forgotten most of the specific matrix multiplication stuff I needed to know to write a ray tracer, and my ray tracer was dog slow compared to pixar's renderman. I wouldn't say it takes multiple PhD careers, though. It was discrete math and a couple upper level CS undergrad courses to get to a working ray tracer, write interesting shaders, and do stuff like fourier transforms of audio on a gpu.
- spookie 2y agoTo get to a working raytracer, yes. But, take a game, or a movie. One needs render things very efficiently in a game, you have 33.3ms of frame budget. Today, raytracing in games either uses just 1 or 2 techniques (e.g. shadows) and calls it a day. If you want to do more, you probably need some help with machine learning (think DLSS). Not to mention, you need a system that accelerates the structures needed to perform it, and somehow marry all this with everything else in game that uses the GPU. You get animations into the mix and the complexity goes up in all areas. In movies, you have more leeway, but the artists still need to iterate fast. You want them to be able to see something akin to the final product fast. It intersects a lot of areas.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoWriting a slow incomplete impl of something is 0.1% of the progress of building an actual one that you would use in production.
- skeeter2020 2y agoyes, sure people are "starting" toy projects in this area all the time. That's not the same thing as a production version will wide support, deep features and targeting the browser.
- pixelpoet 2y agoYou don't actually need matrices at all for basic ray tracing.
- smolder 2y agoYou're right, just vectors and trig are fine for rendering a few spheres or whatever. Doing transforms on 3D model coordinates was where it came in.