Oolite Bulletins

Can anybody recommend any papers on Ray-Tracing, with the caveat that the ones I've already recommended for my students have come back as "too mathematical" - obviously it's virtually impossible to discuss ray-tracing without doing some maths - but if anybody knows of any that use more practical examples to explain the theory that would be much appreciated.

Much Appreciated.

DH

There is ray tracing and ray tracing. If it is only the graphical application of ray tracing, rather than reading things, I will advise you to give them tool to experiment.
Tell them to download and use Pov Ray ( http://www.povray.org/ ). It's the Rolls Royce of ray tracing. And the introduction to the software is explaining a bit what is ray tracing, photon technics etc...
If it is outside like in seismic pre-stack processing, I can help you to find papers but outside this forum.

Makandal wrote:

There is ray tracing and ray tracing. If it is only the graphical application of ray tracing, rather than reading things, I will advise you to give them tool to experiment.
Tell them to download and use Pov Ray ( http://www.povray.org/ ). It's the Rolls Royce of ray tracing. And the introduction to the software is explaining a bit what is ray tracing, photon technics etc...
If it is outside like in seismic pre-stack processing, I can help you to find papers but outside this forum.

Hi Makandal, thanks.

I personally already tinker with POV-Ray, and the students have seen it but haven't used it. The fine line I'm trying to walk is the one between the concept, techniques and reasoning behind using it. i.e. concept = projecting rays from each pixel on the screen back into the scene to each of the light sources, they sort of get (I think - at least they don't glaze over too much), techniques = we've shown them the Quake 4 Ray-Tracing demo and used LightMark2008 because they're quite light and fluffy and not too scary. Reasoning, especially within the Military context is more difficult.

Normally we'd get the guys in from XPI Simulations (http://www.youtube.com/user/xpisimulati ... cjMlREjNB0) but this is a distance learning module of the degree course and the the supporting XPI papers are a little lacking in oomph. In a military context Ray Tracing has the potential to be very good from a simulation of synthetic environment point of view. Proper Atmospherics, lighting, dark shadows, bright highlights, caustics, reflections, visual, UV, IR (even Radar to a certain extent) are all possible from the same rendering if the objects in the scene are properly defined with the correct material properties for each range of interesting EM bandwidths.

I wasn't expecting to find exactly what I wanted, but something to underline some of these interesting attributes but it seems that for once we (i.e. the military) may be trying to do stuff that (m)any others aren't.

any of these any good :

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/raytr ... /part1.php
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf
http://www.siggraph.org/education/mater ... trace0.htm

Killer Wolf wrote:

any of these any good :

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/raytr ... /part1.php
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf
http://www.siggraph.org/education/mater ... trace0.htm

The first and final links are a cracking find (the demo at the end of the final link is simple and therefore intuitive and straightforward!). Thank-you.

The middle paper I have already and is one of the ones that made the students whimper...

cool
i literally just tried something like "ray tracing theory" in google and flicked through the ones that weren't too crammed w/ horrendous equations

Killer Wolf wrote:

cool
i literally just tried something like "ray tracing theory" in google and flicked through the ones that weren't too crammed w/ horrendous equations

The Google-fu is strong in this one...