"Tom York" <alp### [at] zubenelgenubi34spcom> wrote:
> "Mike Sobers" <sob### [at] mindspringcom> wrote:
> > I may be wrong, but I doubt that in '82 they were using raytracing for these
> > CGI animations (hard to believe I was only 7 then ;) ).
>
> You are half-wrong (I think):
>
> http://www.3gcs.com/tron/publications/time-life/index.htm
>
> The company that did the lightcycles used a method to model and render them
> that sounds suspiciously like raytracing of CSG-based objects.
>
> > That's why it's hard to reproduce the effects using a raytracer
> > (same reason why games don't use raytracing - it's too slow).
>
> I think at the time raytracing was competitive because the alternative used
> so much more memory.
>
> Tom


Tom,

You're right about the cycles - great article.  So, they used primatives for
the cycles, probably the rest of the scene used raytracing as well.  Maybe
they used physical objects for the gridlines too (like the example of using
cylinders)?  They could have forced the gridlines to always be behind the
cycles and shadows by either rendering the cycles and background
separately, or by some other z-buffering technique.  There's definitely
something different about the way they did it versus the textured plane
scene in POV-ray, since I'm sure they didn't go to the effort of creating a
texture pattern with variable width gridlines.  Now if we could just figure
it out ... ;)

Mike

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