Chambers wrote:
> I absolutely loved it :)
> 
> And speaking of Pixar, I read recently that Cars was entirely raytraced :)

The Reyes renderer was extended to shade things using ray tracing. 
According to the docs at graphics.pixar.com, they used ray-tracing to do 
accurate reflections and ambient occlusion.

However, a reflected ray is only tested against objects within a certain 
distance; if nothing intersects within that range, then the ray is fed 
into the environment map and the results are taken from there.

The folks at Pixar do appreciate ray-tracing's elegance and capacity for 
accurate reflections and refractions,

*BUT*

the ray-tracing algorithm requires that all of the scene geometry exist 
in memory all at once.  For Pixar's recent work this is likely 
impossible on current machines; the stadium of cars in Cars probably had 
many millions of scene-level objects.

Regards,
John

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