Tuesday, October 8All That Matters

The true power of Ray Tracing.


The true power of Ray Tracing.

The true power of Ray Tracing.



View Reddit by GrandMasterSubZeroView Source

28 Comments

  • Aceticon

    The really good stuff is how areas which would otherwise be dark shadows because they are not in direct line of a lightsource might become lighted by **a different color** because light is reflected from a nearby illuminated surface with that color.

    Ditto for the sunlight coming through a window and illuminating the floor of an interior space causing the whole space to get illuminated by light bouncing off that surface (which again, might be a different color).

    Of course all this requires the 3D spaces to be designed for raytracing (i.e. without addition of fake lights or a non-zero “environmental lighting” to make up for the space being very dark without raytracing) unlike this example for the cheap seats were it’s simply an emmissive surface acting as an area light source.

  • IceFire2050

    Yeah… no. That’s definitely not the “true power” of ray tracing.

    That might not even be ray tracing. Just reflection mapping. Depends on how they went about doing it.

    Ray Tracing is a lot more than just “make everything look wet and reflective”.

    If he was wearing a bright blue jacket, and the light hitting his jacket reflected on to the back of his neck gave a subtle blue light on his neck, that would be much more impressive for ray tracing.

    A dark room where someone shines a bright light through a hole in the wall having that light scatter around the room properly rather than just giving you a sort of spotlight effect, is more impressive ray tracing.

    Ray Tracing, at is full potential involves light moving from a source, hitting something, then hitting something else, repeat. But doing it dynamically in real time in a game engine rather than being rendered for movie footage is asking a lot. Most games when they use “Ray Tracing” just do the single beam of light and dont take the scattering in to effect. It’s still Ray Tracing, but it’s a really lackluster result compared to what it can really do.

  • Slow-job-

    That could be done with masks. The illumination wouldn’t be incredibly accurate but you wouldn’t notice because it’s the back a dude’s head in a videogame

  • RandomGuyinACorner

    Nothing about this image screams ray tracing.

    More like the power of

    * custom rain shader using normal maps for rain trails

    * global real time illumination from light sources

    * reflection real-time probes

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