nemesis <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> > And speaking of Pixar, I read recently that Cars was entirely raytraced :)

> Not sure.  Renderman is capable of raytracing, but its main pipeline is a kind
> of scanline:  REYES.  Besides, I think in the DVD they said the reflections on
> the cars were limited to 2 or 3 bounces, not to bog it down indefinitely.  And
> all those desert scenaries surely don't require raytracing...

  It was one of the major technological points in Cars: They wanted it
raytraced, and they had to use advanced technology for that to be possible,
one example being using volumetric rays (ie. cones instead of line segments).
  (The reason to use cones instead of lines when tracing is that many effects,
such as mip-mapping, require knowing not only the location of the intersection
on the texture, but the area of the visible portion of the texture at that
place.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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