This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
15.5. Intermezzo
To render a scene, we needed to iterate over both triangles and pixels. In the previous section, we arbitrarily chose to arrange the pixel loop on the outside and the triangle loop on the inside. That yielded the ray-casting algorithm. The ray-casting algorithm has three nice properties: It somewhat mimics the underlying physics, it separates the visibility routine from the shading routine, and it leverages the same ray-triangle intersection routine for both eye rays and shadow rays.
Admittedly, the relationship between ray casting and physics at the level demonstrated here is somewhat tenuous. Real photons propagate along rays from the light source to a surface to an eye, and we traced that path backward. Real photons don’t all scatter into the camera. Most photons from the light source scatter away from the camera, and much of the light that is scattered toward the camera from a surface didn’t arrive at that surface directly from the light. Nonetheless, an algorithm for sampling light along rays is a very good starting point for sampling photons, and it matches our intuition about how light should propagate. You can probably imagine improvements that would better model the true scattering behavior of light. Much of the rest of this book is devoted to such models.
In the next section, we invert the nesting order of the loops to yield a rasterizer algorithm. We then explore the implications of that change. We already have a working ray tracer to compare against. Thus, we can easily test the correctness of our changes by comparing against the ray-traced image and intermediate results. We also have a standard against which to measure the properties of the new algorithm. As you read the following section and implement the program that it describes, consider how the changes you are making affect code clarity, modularity, and efficiency. Particularly consider efficiency in both a wall-clock time and an asymptotic run time sense. Think about applications for which one of rasterization and ray casting is a better fit than the other.
These issues are not restricted to our choice of the outer loop. All high-performance renderers subdivide the scene and the image in sophisticated ways. The implementer must choose how to make these subdivisions and for each must again revisit whether to iterate first over pixels (i.e., ray directions) or triangles. The same considerations arise at every level, but they are evaluated differently based on the expected data sizes at that level and the machine architecture.