Blender Adds Raytracing

rastachops writes "Blender, the Open Source 3D modelling tool has recently added Raytracing to its extensive list of features. 'Believe it or not, but Ton has integrated the raytracer from Blender's predecessor, Traces into Blender. He said "the algorithm has been optimized and is now ten times faster. Combine that with a PC that's forty times faster than in the early 1990's and raytracing is almost usable". For a comparison checkout the before and after screenshots.'"

Comments

Blender is getting mature

[g_braad]

Hopefully they add even more usable features to it, like a decent shader... and a better user interface. I still prefer Maya for my overall work, but if Blender is evolving in this same pace. It is perhaps someday possible to switch to a cheaper solution

Comparison

[Psychic Burrito]

Hmm... wouldn't it be much easier to compare the two renderers if the rendered the same picture, the same size, and with the same lighting?

Re:What's the use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually raytracing is the faster method. When your polygon count goes beyond billion, that is.

Whar Blender really needs...

[Pig Hogger]

... is a way of outputting POV files.

Re:What's the use?

[PixelSlut]

Raytracing is *the* elegant solution. Rasterisers use smoke and mirrors to achieve the same effects. Often those tricks are not flawless -- for example, you often see a smoke or explosion texture intersecting with nearby walls, creating an ugly edge. This is not the kind of thing I would want to see in a production movie, but in a game, it's not so rough.

Keep in mind that all the Pixar movies use rasterization techniques, not raytracing or radiosity. The reason you see those problems you stated above has nothing to do with raytracing vs rasterization (because they're essentially geometric problems, and raytracers use geometry in the same way that OpenGL and other rasterizers do), it's because games are real-time, and thus all possibilities are not accounted for. In a movie, the artists have the ability to check every frame for such artifacts, but they don't have that luxery in game development.

I think it's pretty clear that right now, both offline global illumination renderers (raytracing and radiosity) and real-time rasterizers have their places in the current market.

Re:What's the use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that what the marketers on the PeeCee redefined raytracing to mean is not the original usage - if you look at output of the descendants of amiga "raytracers", they do far more than what PC people seem to think raytracing means. As far as Mad Finnish ex-Amiga people are concerned, raytracing means tracking simulated physically-accurate beams of light through solid objects, complete with mixtures of wavelengths and so on. Caustics, prismatic spectra and the like just drop out of real raytracing. If you model the physical equations of light, you get the right answer. As far as I'm concerned, if you model a convex lens, and put it in front of an object, if the object isn't magnified, then it's not raytracing!

Re:What's the use?

[hawkstone]

Oh, sure it's painful! Extremely, tremendously painful. But mathematically it all works out.

Take caustics, for instance, like a magnifying glass focusing a light source onto a small point on a surface. This is, and has been, done using raytracing.

I've not actually implemented it, but I'm slightly familiar with the techniques. I imagine some intelligent sampling of incident rays, and maybe adaptive supersampling of these rays, would help a lot with the phenomenal costs.

Photon maps are another solution, and (if I remember correctly), they implement forward ray tracing instead of the usual backward ones. Since you can then cast rays from the light source outward, this can be much, much cheaper.