A method of ray tracing for free-form optical surfaces has been developed. The ray tracing through such surfaces is based on Delaunay triangulation of the discrete data of the surface and is related to finite-element modeling. Some numerical examples of applications to analytical, noisy, and experimental free-form surfaces (in particular, a corneal topography map) are presented. Ray-tracing res...

Ray tracing has become a very popular method for image synthesis due to its un paralleled exibility and its ability the generate images of high quality and realism Simulation of e ects such as re ection and refraction have been the hallmarks of ray tracing since its introduction With the advent of stochastic ray tracing the range of e ects expanded to include motion blur soft shadows depth of e...

Ray-tracing techniques for image rendering have produced some of the most realistic images to date. They are also slow because the process of tracing a ray is computationally intensive and because there are many rays to be traced. However. since computations for each pixel are independent, ray tracing is amenable t o parallel processing uslng image space subdivision. The processor per subdivisi...

For realistic image synthesis and many other simulation applications, ray tracing is the only choice to achieve the desired realism and accuracy. Ray tracing has become such an important algorithm that an implementation in hardware is justified and desirable. The first ray tracing hardware realizations have been using floating point and logarithmic arithmetic. While floating point arithmetic re...

Reconstructing and designing media with continuously-varying refractive index fields remains a challenging problem in computer graphics. A core difficulty trying to tackle this inverse is that light travels inside such along curves, rather than straight lines. Existing techniques for make strong assumptions on the shape of ray medium, thus limit themselves where deflection relatively small. Mor...

Ray-tracing is one of the most popular techniques for rendering 3D images. Effects such as shadows, reflection, refraction and so on can be produced with this technique. However, raytracing is a point-sampling technique with well-known aliasing problems. In particular, small objects and small shadows can be hidden between rays and not be detected. No ray-tracing method, even using oversampling,...

The ray buuer algorithm presented here is part of an alternative strategy of ray tracing called breadth rst ray tracing. Breadth rst ray tracing diiers from usual pixel-wise rendering in tracing whole generations of rays together. This means that rst all rays of view are treated, next the set of re-ecting and refracting rays, then the reeecting and refracting rays caused by them, and so on. The...

Ray tracing has long been a method of choice for off-line rendering, but traditionally was too slow for interactive use. With faster hardware and algorithmic improvements this has recently changed, and real-time ray tracing is finally within reach. However, real-time capability also opens up new problems that do not exist in an off-line environment. In particular real-time ray tracing offers th...

For almost two decades researchers have argued that ray tracing will eventually become faster than the rasterization technique that completely dominates todays graphics hardware. However, this has not happened yet. Ray tracing is still exclusively being used for off-line rendering of photorealistic images and it is commonly believed that ray tracing is simply too costly to ever challenge raster...

In recent years, applying the powerful computational resources delivered by modern GPUs to ray tracing has resulted in a number of ray tracing implementations that allow rendering of moderately sized scenes at interactive speeds. For non-static scenes, besides ray tracing performance, fast construction of acceleration data structures such as kd-trees is of primary concern. In this paper, we pre...