Free Essays, Term Papers, Research Papers at Anti Essays

Ray Tracing

Ray tracing is a popular rendering technique, which consists of studying the path of light by following rays of light as they interact with optical surfaces. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of photorealism; usually higher than that of typical scanline rendering methods, but come with a computational cost. Its primary applications are generally in 3D computer graphics, especially scenes that can be rendered before hand, such as still images or special effects.
Ray tracing is basically an attempt to imitate nature. The colors that we see in real world are actually rays of light casted by a light source, bouncing around the detailed scenery of nature, and finally hitting our eyes, creating the image that we see. Using this concept, ray tracing is capable of producing three-dimensional graphics with a rather complex light interactions.
The main advantage of using ray tracing over any other rendering technique is its stunning visual results. This is largely due to the fact that any light related effects come naturally with the way ray tracing algorithm is designed. Ray tracing is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and chromatic aberration, at a high level with ease. Also, due to the design of the algorithm, the computational independence of each ray makes ray tracing amenable to parallelization.
As nice as ray tracing may sound, it does come with a cost. It has poor performance with its complexity being exponentially high based of the number of objects. Some ray tracing pictures take hours to render, some take even longer. In its current stage, it is also unfit for any dynamical or real-time rendering since adding an object to the scene requires the algorithm to have to render everything a new.
The implementation of ray tracing is actually quite simple. In ray tracing, a ray of light is traced in a backward fashion....