there aren’t much made with polygons eighter… nor spines nor anything… they are a) volumetric (think about it, 3d geometry is in fact flat… proven by the new siggraph paper wich demonstrates unwrapping a mesh onto a 2d texture )
and b) they are made of particles…
LETS DO VOXELIZE!
i just love raytracers… well… and the spheres are useful anyways… speedup by 300% if you have boundingspheres around each cuple of triangles…
i’ve rewritten my intersection test a bit, now its even more visible how good sse would fit into it… very low amount of multiplications and additions… have to set up some code and test it, possibly at the weekend, we’ll see…
and yeah, a “normally good” raytracer scales about logarithmically with complexity… its basically the same as in the unreal engine (the software version). it doesn’t mather how big and how complex and what ever the level is. only what is visible mathers, and even that is not that important. in the end, more or less unreal only cares about the amount of pixels on screen (+the characters…). portals with beamtree are about the way raytracers work…its cool
and yes, the first hit, the one with the camera - rays can be done with rastericers, thats really a simple but effective optimization…
and yes, opengl can help raytracing as well, can’t wait for my r300… first test done directly with rastericers, then generate the rays there per pixel and rerender all the triangles, but fullscreen (i will render on 320x240…), and instead of a triangle simply the components get sent into the pixelshader, and you render a fullscreenquad. that way you do all the ray-triangle intersection in the pixelshader…
thats about the basic idea, i think shadows could be done quite good, and possibly first reflections as well… we’ll see how much can be done yet… naturesuxx roxx… its awesome (and it is quite general useable, not like heaven7 wich fakes about everything it can (but its awesome anyways))
they even plan to code a game with naturesuxx, can’t wait for that one… (oh, and a new cpu )