Raycasting Primary Usage-Why Realtime Simulations Would Be Just A Myth

In the process of ray casting, the modeled geometry is parsed line by line and pixel by pixel towards the outside from the point of view. It gives the idea that it is casting its rays out from the heart of the viewpoint. In areas where the objects intersect, the value of the color can be analyzed through a number of methods. Simply speaking, the object’s color value at the area of intersection is seen as that pixel value. Texture map sometimes helps to determine the color while a very sophisticated approach is modifying of the color value through illumination factors, although there is a calculation of the relationship it has with a simulated source of light. For reduction of artifacts to take place, an averaging of ray sets can be done in different directions.

Calculating The Pixel Value

Optical properties of rough simulations sometimes can be employed where there is a simple ray calculation to a point of view from an object. It is also possible to calculate the light ray’s angle of incidence from the sources of light. From this calculation and other specified intensities of the source of light, the pixel value can also be determined. Other simulations utilize plotted illumination from algorithms of radiosity while a combination of the different methods is sometimes used.

Real-Time Simulations

Real-time simulations primarily use ray casting such as the real-time simulations in cartoon animations and 3D PC games that require lots of details. In cases where faking details is efficient, real-time simulations are also employed to enjoy better performance in the stage of computation. Such is what happens when lots of frames have to be animated with the surface that results having a flat characteristic appearance especially if there are no extra tricks incorporated. All objects in a specific scene might look like they were painted using a matte finish.

Computer Games And Ray Casting

Wolfenstein 3D

Wolfenstein 3D world is created from a square based type of grid with the same wall heights meeting the ceilings and solid colored floors. For the world to be drawn, ray tracing of each ray is done from each screen’s pixel column as a wall texture’s vertical slice is scaled and selected as per the area of the world where the ray is to meet the wall including the length it has to travel before that happens. The grid based levels have a number of purposes, chief of which is the wall to ray collisions that is found much faster as a result of the potential hits ending up more predictable while there is a reduction of the memory overhead.

Voxel Space

The self-styled Voxel Space created by Nova Logic especially for Comanche game series has a platform where rays are traced through every screen’s pixel column while testing every ray against the points appearing on a height map.  Each height map’s element is then transformed into pixel column while ascertaining the ones that are visible or have not been hidden by the front drawn pixels before drawing them using the texture map’s matching colors.

About The Author:

Mark is a civil engineer who now works as a interior designer. He loves to blogs in his free time. He occasionally uses www.render-online.com for rendering projects as it works out quite cost effective.