[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Ray traced environments

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

On 3/20/07, Tess Snider <malkyne at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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,"
>

Its worth noting that Pixar did *no* ray tracing til cars.

Even there it was for very specific effects applied to very specific
places in the film

<cynical statement>
Ray tracing is most popular with beginning CG programmers, mostly
because with easy to code and understand structures you cna get
remarkably good pictures.... very very slowly.

Ray tracing is easy.  *efficient* ray-tracing, is hard.
</cynical statement>