3 ms·

Animation for the Masses

• comatose_kid 19y ago
  'Essentially, then, ray tracing tries to find the right information in a database as quickly as possible. ' Huh - that isn't really describing the core principle behind raytracing...
  • far33d 19y ago
    Well sure it is. You are doing intersections of rays with the "scene database". The biggest bottleneck in MOST raytracing systems is ray-intersection, not shading or lighting calculations, especially for complex things like refraction, reflection (and even worse with high-curvature surfaces). It's not a relational database, but really, you are just doing complex database queries..
    • comatose_kid 19y ago
      It may be the largest bottleneck (although I had thought light transport was), but I wasn't talking about bottlenecks, I was just observing that this was not the clearest way to summarize the concept of raytracing.
  • deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]
• far33d 19y ago
  I do have one beef with this article... This is "rendering for the masses" not "animation for the masses". The two have very little to do with each other. Great animation comes from good timing, good acting, and other things that have very little to do with the quality of the image that is being produced.