Developments in Ray-Tracing

After a brief recall of the basic principles of ray-tracing, the traditional and distributed approaches will be presented with the related illumination models. This will include an introduction to relevant topics such as photometry and optics, Monte-Carlo integration, stochastic sampling and a discussion on implementation issues. Then, the fundamental problem of ray object intersection will be tackled. First, intersection algorithms for various type of objects will be described including simple objects (solid primitives, polygons,...) as well as more complex objects (bicubic patches, fractals, CSG modelled object,...). Then, after a discussion on bounding volumes, the case of large and complex collections of primitives is considered by examining the two basic classes of organizing structure (i.e. hierarchical data structure and space-partitioning) and their related traversal algorithms. Eventually, the parallel processing issue will be discussed.