Hi all, lets make a ray tracer :o

[Pon]

Hiya everyone. I'm Pon, obviously. For the last few weeks, I've been extensively researching ray tracing, and, to a much lesser extent, radiosity. This is because I want to make a ray tracing/radiosity/photon-mapping engine...:sleep:

I haven't written out any kind of design document, and, to be honest, this is as close as I've done so far... But here goes:


It is to be as physically correct as current algorithms allow.
It will be heavily optimized, but realism will always be of higher importance.
Even though it will be slow NOW, if it is kept in working order, due to Moore's (I think :lol:) Law, it should be an attractive alternative renderer.
Hopefully, I will create a full game engine on top of this, although it is highly improbable that I could do such a thing:blush:

Anyway, I would highly appreciate it if someone were to join me in my epic quest against the imperialist... Err... Sorry, I just watched Enemy At The Gates :wacko: But yeah, you hopefully get the idea.

[anubis]

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/raytracing_series/part1.php

This will be without a doubt of great value to you then

edit : Never mind, I missed your otehr thread

[Reedbeta]

I'm actually already working on a raytracer with much the same goals as you describe. I haven't put up a website for it or any such (it's at a very early stage of development), but I hope one day it will become an attractive open-source (read: free) alternative to things like RenderMan and Mental Ray (the megalomaniac in me was speaking there, hehehe).

[bramz]

Haha, hi Reedbeta! =)

I'm working on my own ray tracer as well: "LiAR isn't a raytracer". It's no where near finished, there are still major features missing (and it's slow as hell too), but it's fun ... it's hosted by sourceforge, so it is open source already =) http://liar.sourceforge.net Currently, I'm struggling to get lights smoothly fit in the design ...

Bramz

[Axel]

There is also toxic in case somebody hasn't heard of it yet: http://www.toxicengine.org/

[roel]

http://www.yafray.org/

[Pon]

Hi everyone, thanks for all the replies... I think I made myself unclear before. When I said "it should be an attractive alternative renderer", I meant for a game engine, as opposed to rasterisation. Bramz, I must say that I am very impressed by your ray tracer, it looks stunning. Are you planning to use it for a modeling program or a game?

Roel and Axel: Both of those engines look awesome :D I especially love that YAFRAY vodka bottle picture :D:D:D

[anubis]

There is also toxic in case somebody hasn't heard of it yet: http://www.toxicengine.org/

Toxic is in a rather unfinished state though and hasn't been developed for quite some time now.

[bramz]

Thanks, though it's nowhere near the quality of yafray and toxic yet =) LiAR is written as a python module, and it is my hope i can connect it somehow to Blender (like yafray is). Of course, I won't be able to connect it as tight as Yafray is, since that would require changes in the Blender sources ...

It's not intended for a game. It's just terribly too slow for that. A RTRT for games requires a completely different design than LiAR has ... I have written an RTRT demo (http://users.skynet.be/bdegreve/projects/platracer/index.html) once but that code is just too damn ugly to be of any use anymore =)

BTW, you might be interested in the OpenRT (http://www.openrt.de/) project ...

Bramz