[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Ray traced environments

[Tess Snider]

On 3/19/07, Damion Schubert <dschubert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Surprising revelation:
> the "mad world" commercial we all know and love was shot entirely in
> engine.  (Link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccWrbGEFgI8 )

I should see if they're eligible for the next Mackies.  It may have
come out too late for the '06ers.  Would be a good entry for the "Best
Commercial Machinima" category.

> The gist was that it is now so easy to do top quality graphics with modern
> GPUs, but it is becoming increasingly harder to replicate what a good
> GPU & Shader system can do in a package like Maya.

Yeah, I was complaining at work to someone the other day that in their
effort to remain relevant to both the Hollywood crowd and the game dev
crowd, the big 3D modeling packages are really starting to fall behind
our needs.

I'm really with Jeffrey and Mike on the raytracing issue.  I'm not
sure baseline raytracing is going to get you results that are
sufficiently better than what we have to even bother.  It is by no
means a magic bullet.  You don't suddenly get to stop using shaders.
Even people with vast render farms still have to use "obscure tricks,"
if you will, because raytracing doesn't get them what they need.
Raytracing is just another solution to a problem, with some
advantages, and the disadvantage of being considerably slower.

Look at this scene from Toy Story, using raytracing (and probably some
material shaders):
http://media.outnow.ch/Movies/Images/1995/ToyStory/dvd-film.ws/16.jpg

Do we need raytracing to match that scene today?

Tess