Ray tracing ( born Ray tracing ; ray tracing ) - one of the methods of geometric optics - the study of optical systems by tracking the interaction of individual rays with surfaces. In a narrow sense - the technology for constructing images of three-dimensional models in computer programs, in which the reverse path of the beam (from the screen to the source) is tracked.
Ray tracing in computer games is a solution for creating realistic lighting, reflections and shadows, providing a higher level of realism compared to traditional rendering methods. Turing was the first architecture to allow real-time ray tracing on a GPU. [one]
Content
Advantages and disadvantages of current method implementations
Advantages
- the ability to render smooth objects without approximating them with polygonal surfaces (for example, triangles);
- the computational complexity of the method is weakly dependent on the complexity of the scene;
- high algorithmic parallelism of calculations - it is possible to trace two or more rays in parallel and independently, to separate sections (screen areas) for tracing at different nodes of the cluster, etc.
- clipping of invisible surfaces, perspective and correct changes in the field of view are the logical consequence of the algorithm.
Weaknesses
A major drawback of the backtracking method is performance. The method of rasterizing and scanning rows uses data coherence to distribute calculations between pixels. While the ray tracing method each time begins the process of determining the color of a pixel anew, considering each ray of observation separately. However, this separation entails the appearance of some other advantages, such as the ability to trace more rays than was supposed to eliminate contour irregularities in certain places of the model. It also regulates the reflection of rays and the effects of refraction, and in general - the degree of photorealistic image.
Software
Free
- BRL-CAD
- Cycles ( Blender )
- Luxender
- Sunflow
- Yafaray
- Pov ray
Proprietary
- Arnold
- Brazil R / S
- BusyRay (plugin for 3DS MAX)
- finalRender
- Frryrender
- Gelato
- Holomatix Rendition (interactive ray tracer )
- Indigo renderer
- Kerkythea
- Mantra (as part of the Houdini package)
- Maxwell render
- mental ray
- RenderMan (PhotoRealistic or PRMan)
- V ray
- bCAD
- Solidworks
Notes
- β Meet video cards with the architecture of NVIDIA Turing (Russian) , NVIDIA . Date accessed August 21, 2018.
Links
- Dmitry Chekanov. Ray Tracing vs. Rasterization: A New Generation of Graphics Quality? . Tom's Hardware (September 7, 2009). Date of treatment September 7, 2009. Archived on February 8, 2012.
- Lev Dymchenko. Problems of ray tracing - from the future to the real time 6. The world of nVidia (December 13, 2009). Date of treatment March 21, 2010. Archived February 8, 2012.
- Interactive ray tracing using SIMD instructions (Russian)
- ray-tracing.ru - Articles on ray tracing + ray tracer on CUDA (Russian)
- The Ray Tracing News - short articles and links
- Games using realtime raytracing
Software
- PBRT - a Physically Based Raytracer
- Tachyon
- Rayshade
- OpenRT - realtime raytracing library
- Raster3d
- interactive kd-tree ray tracing - Brook GPU realtime raytracing
- Zemax
- More ray tracing source code links