old? Q3A demo ... raytraced

I fail to see what's so demanding about raytracing, because it looks far from impressive to me.
 
DaCocoBrova said:
I fail to see what's so demanding about raytracing, because it looks far from impressive to me.


Download the video?

Basically raytracing is lighting done correctly. It's calculate pixel per pixel by tracing light rays from the observer to an object and then bouncing off the object accordingly and tracing it some more until for some reason it stops.

All lighting done on games and such now are just rough approximations of how lighting should look.


Read this for examples: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter/
 
Ray tracing is neat, but not as wonderful as some people think. There are algorithms that more closely simulate true optical phenomena, and the less 'realistic' algorithms currently used in consoles and PC video cards are making big strides in appearance.

When it comes down to it, CG will always be an approximation of what really happens in the real world with light. While ray tracing may be conceptually more elegant, if you can achieve the same results with other techniques that require less computation, why not do so?
 
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