Ray Tracing

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I looked at the quake 3 screens... i cannot tell a difference.

Neither can I - except that they look like crap. Did they have to run it at low settings?

If I remember correctly, ray tracing seems to be the "real" way to do realistic lighting, though I've never seen it do and soft edge stuff. It's just a different way to calculate lighting. I think at the moment, it's much too slow for any realtime application.

I read somewhere a couple of months ago that it took like 20 fast computers "supercomputered" together to run a raytraced version of Quake3 at like 20 fps.

from what ive read, raytracing calculates every light photon or something. so basically its a more realistic form of lighting thats only used for rendering(usually) and you can use it to determine how the light will bend through an object, like if you wanted to make a glass kind of thing, the light would bend through it and make it distort things as you look through it.

Yep, in short ray tracing is a highly accurate and realistic but also very slow way of rendering lighting. Compared to the usual vertex or lightmap lighting ray tracing works very similar to the real world.

Well who gives a fuck, i cant tell the difference so why dont they drop it til better computers come out.

Well ray tracing can for sure give better results than thoose. It is used in all big renders such as Brazil. Looks nice enough to me:

[Blocked Image: http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/spluttergallery/pics/375.jpg]

that can be pulled off with the regular light rendering, too.

that looks relaly fucking good...is it photoshoped?

Judging from the lips it's CG.

Anyway, i give a fuck. I think that with raytracing we can make prettier and more realistic things in the end. Right now you might not see the difference but that doesn't mean it's something crappy or something that doesn't have any meaning at all.

The video doesn't load, that's probably why

Quote from DanielAragon

that looks relaly fucking good...is it photoshoped?

If I remember correctly, yes, but only because it was/is a multi-pass image. Refelections are rendered, then added on to a color render, then onto a shadow image, etc.

cool stuff

Afaik is real time raytracing the future. I have heard of it before. Modern hardware and even the coming next gen technology is too slow for it tho. But wait a few years and you will see it in games.