Rays, representing light paths or photons, are then traced to determine what light value is seen by the camera sensor in a given direction. Figure 2 shows how the environment consists of a camera, set of lights, 3D geometric models, and material descriptions of these models. Ray tracing directly simulates light traveling through a virtual environment. This computer-generated image generated by Enrico Cerica using OctaneRender shows ray traced shadows and reflections on the complex floor finish How Does Ray Tracing Work Fidelity can remain uncompromised, as shown in figure 1, and algorithms can be elegantly implemented, at the cost of massively complex computational workload. All of these interactions combine to produce the final color of a pixel displayed on the screen. Light may reflect from one object to another (causing reflections), be blocked by objects (causing shadows), or pass through transparent or semi-transparent objects (simulating translucency or dielectrics like glass or water) as it traverses the scene. Ray tracing calculates the color of pixels by tracing the path that light takes traveling from the eye of the viewer through the virtual 3D scene.

Ray tracing generates highly realistic images by simulating the physical behavior of light. Ray tracing represents an important step to achieving greater realism. Maintaining good performance usually requires using short-cuts or estimations, which can affect overall realism.

While rasterization can be extremely efficient for producing images in real-time, adding realistic lighting effects to a rasterization pipeline adds complexity, requiring many hand-tuned parameters based on a given scene. These pixels may then be further processed or “shaded” before final display on the screen. The rendering pipeline then converts each triangle of the 3D models into pixels on a 2D image plane. Rasterization uses objects created from a mesh of triangles or polygons to represent a 3D model of an object.

Conventional 3D rendering has typically used a process called rasterization since the 1990s.

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