Sunday, November 16, 2014

A fun tidbit from the original ray tracing paper

We're about 35 years after Whitted's classic ray tracing paper.  It's available here.  One thing that went by people at the time is he proposed randomized glossy reflection in it.


Always be on the lookout for things current authors say are too slow!

Note that Rob Cook, always a careful scholar, credits Whitted for this idea in his classic 1984 paper.

2 comments:

Phil Dutré said...

Always be on the lookout for things current authors say are too slow!

Ah yes! It's one the things junior graphics researchers need to learn all the time. It's not because 5 years ago someone said something is too slow, it will be too slow for always. Balance between CPU/CPU/Memorylookup changes all the time, as do the algorithms. And perhaps the original author was just dead wrong.

Phil Dutré said...

Cfr. "30K photons should be enough for a photon map". Perhaps, but the main reason for that statement was that in 96, no more than 30K photons fitted in main memory.