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Lecture 9: Raytracing (4)
joannejqi

This website has a good explanation of ray casting and how it was used in Wolfenstein 3D back in 1992: https://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html

VioIchigo

As mentioned in this slide, the procedure of ray casting is basically:

For every pixel:

   Construct a ray from the eye

   For every object in the scene:

      Find intersection with the ray

      Keep if closest
peterqiu1997

One simplifying assumption of ray tracing is that a surface facing a light will receive that light and not be blocked or in shadow. I'm guessing there's a limitation/additional challenge when modeling objects that bend/refract light or are slightly transparent?

tristanburke

@joannejqi Thanks for sharing that link! I thought it was clever how they worked around raytracing and light / shadow computation by simply coloring walls with a darker version of the texture to give the appearance of shadows!

nathanpetreaca

I think an interesting way of thinking about this, or at least it is how I first thought about it, is as the old emission theory. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision)) Basically back then, people used to believe that the way they saw the world was through rays that emitted from their eyes. Kind of interesting how a debunked theory is used in technology. (https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/774/33266564316_bfc077540e_b.jpg) https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/images-from-johann-zahns-oculus-artificialis-1685/

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