On 08.02.12 15:17, handos wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I needed a help from you guys and some pointers on improving my knowledge and
> awareness in ray tracing in general. I'd be very happy if you could all spend a
> little effort in answering my questions
>
> (a) Can you please point me to a nice tutorial which you had read back when you
> were a beginner in ray tracing?

http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/211/

"An Introduction to Ray tracing" is what you want, it is still as relevant 
today as it was 1989.

> (b) My task is to render this office sequence and
> create a video out of it. I've done that but it takes enormous time and I want
> to create videos of this for many different frame-rates. All I'd need is your
> help in again cutting down the stuff that's not really relevant in this without
> hampering it's realism.

Render on more than one system! - There is no magic switch in POV-Ray that 
makes it slower, its the nature of the algorithm, hence there is no switch 
to make it faster.

> (c) How far we think POVRay is compared to other ray tracers like OptiX in
> NVIDIA as far as performance is concerned?

POV-Ray is a universal recursive ray-tracer, OptiX is a triangle-mesh 
ray-tracer that is only really efficient with a trace level of one, so its 
like comparing apples and oranges.

> (d) Are you aware of any other software (free!) etc. that are capable of
> creating similar scenes as office scene of Jaime in POVRay?

Any free 3d modeller will do to create the models, the scene composition 
requires artistic talent though. Wikipedia is your friend for comparison of 
free 3d modellers that might suit you.

> (e) I need basically an indoor scene (e.g. office types, house etc.), is it
> possible to get easily and render it not necessarily in POVRay but do it on a
> general purpose computer but *really* efficiently?

You will need to do your own homework and research ;-)

> (f) Can you also provide me a state-of-the-art report on Ray Tracing today and
> how far it has advanced and where it will go in the next few years? Something
> like this http://graphics.stanford.edu/~boulos/papers/star07rt.pdf

The ACM digital library is your friend. Your university certainly has paid 
for the access to it.

> www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ahanda


     Thorsten

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