In physical reality, photons travel in waves. Are there any implications or differences when modeling light traveling in straight lines, or is the visual effect essentially the same?
Boomaa23
@theflyingpie I don't think the visual effect changes because the photons are traveling in very very small waves, i.e. microscopic at most. So given graphics is about modeling what we can see, and you can't see photons moving in a sinusoidal pattern, I doubt that this has an effect on the rendering of said waves. That being said, perhaps this is part of the reason why aliasing doesn't happen in real life despite the finite number of rods/cones in our eyes. I'm not entirely sure; definitely an interesting question.
Edge7481
@theflyingpie I'd imagine there are scenarios where you get a better result if light is treated like a wave. As far as I know you can't model the double slit experiment using ray tracing
AnikethPrasad
I believe that the wave-like nature of photons is so small that it can pretty accurately be represented by a straight line. We use the straight-line approximation for lighting paths and this gives us pretty good results as with ray tracing.
agao25
@AnikethPrasad Ray tracing definitely gives us good results with straight-line approximation, but I don't think it properly encapsulates how a wave would distribute into a gradient when passed through the double-slit experiment. I'm sure we could model light as sin/cos waves bouncing around and do things to get even better rendering, but computational power and and general math approximation maybe limit us from a perfect match (although computer-generated pictures are getting realer and realer).
In physical reality, photons travel in waves. Are there any implications or differences when modeling light traveling in straight lines, or is the visual effect essentially the same?
@theflyingpie I don't think the visual effect changes because the photons are traveling in very very small waves, i.e. microscopic at most. So given graphics is about modeling what we can see, and you can't see photons moving in a sinusoidal pattern, I doubt that this has an effect on the rendering of said waves. That being said, perhaps this is part of the reason why aliasing doesn't happen in real life despite the finite number of rods/cones in our eyes. I'm not entirely sure; definitely an interesting question.
@theflyingpie I'd imagine there are scenarios where you get a better result if light is treated like a wave. As far as I know you can't model the double slit experiment using ray tracing
I believe that the wave-like nature of photons is so small that it can pretty accurately be represented by a straight line. We use the straight-line approximation for lighting paths and this gives us pretty good results as with ray tracing.
@AnikethPrasad Ray tracing definitely gives us good results with straight-line approximation, but I don't think it properly encapsulates how a wave would distribute into a gradient when passed through the double-slit experiment. I'm sure we could model light as sin/cos waves bouncing around and do things to get even better rendering, but computational power and and general math approximation maybe limit us from a perfect match (although computer-generated pictures are getting realer and realer).