Videogame Graphics

Gunner12

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Dec 18, 2006
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Bay Area, CA
I've had this idea floating around in my mind for a bit now.

Ray tracing gives realistic graphics but take a lot of computing hardware to do well.

Rasterizing is faster but isn't as accurate.

What if they were combined?

I might have read one or two things about combining them but I don't remember where or when I read them.

For example, in an underwater scene. The above water part and under water part is rasterized, then the way the light travels from air into water is ray traced so it is more realistic. Ray tracing is only used for part of the scene so it should be quicker then just plain ray tracing and look better then rasterizing.

Or in a scene with a mirror. Most of the scene is rasterized. The parts of the scene stuff that the mirror reflects is then raytraced. The objects that are visible through the mirror are rasterized but the way they are reflected is ray traced. That was probably confusing so I'll try to explain again.

Much of a scene is rasterized. The image that the "camera" sees through the mirror is raytraced using the rasterized information provided from the part being reflected in the mirror. For example, a curved mirror at the end of the hallway. The hallway is rasterized. The engine then takes that info and uses it as kinda of a source of light and directs it to the mirror. The reflected image from the mirror is raytraced using the rasterized hallway.

That was probably even more confusing. I don't know how to explain it and not sure if pictures will help. If someone understand what I'm trying to say and can explain it better, please help me learn how to explain thing.
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I have only done very very basic programming so I don't know how hard it is to program such an engine. I'm guessing that it won't be easy.

Just an idea I had of kinda bridging the gap between ray tracing and rasterizing.
 
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