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Blender Adds Raytracing

Posted by michael on from the puree-liquefy-churn dept.

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.'"

3 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Blender is getting mature by g_braad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    --
    F/OSS & IT Consultant
  2. Whar Blender really needs... by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... is a way of outputting POV files.

  3. Re:What's the use? by hawkstone · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.