Hi, recently I read quite interesting post in this forum about raytracing. It seems quite interesting, can somebody point out where to start ? some articles/document for the beginner who likes to know more ? ps : I''m not quite new in graphic prog. but hit me with anything u can show thx

There are plenty of introductory-level resources on the web. I personally don''t have any intro-level links, but you can find some easily with Google:

For basic raytracing theory
Go here next

Once you get past the very basics you''ll find that resources start becoming hard to find; at that point you either need a formal graphics class from a university, or the math and abstraction skills to read and learn from the academic papers that can be found through sites such as Citeseer (which seems to be temporarily down at the time of this writing). Since you''ve got some experience in graphics programming this shouldn''t be too big of a problem for you.

Of course there''s always plenty of very knowledgable people around here who you can ask questions.


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Don''t quite agree. There''s some great raytracing resources, but I remember not finding a lot through Google when I was starting.

Check out Ray Tracing: Graphics for the Masses and the excellant Fuzzy Photon.

HTH

Shameless plug for my own simple raytracer and realtime ASCII raytracer.

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I''d categorize both of those sites as being introductory-level. Unless you want to read highly specific academic papers, there simply is no good resource for more advanced raytracing topics (global illumination, spatial partitioning techniques, advanced procedural shading, high-quality lighting models, strategies for designing distributed raytracers, etc. etc.). The bulk of the research and documentation available is in a form that requires a lot of work and mathematical expertise to interpret and convert into code. RTNews is about as close as one can get, but even that does not describe a lot of the more relevant algorithms and methods in great detail.