- Ray Casting
Published:
(work-in-progress)
Ray casting was a popular rendering technique in the 1990s. During that time, the ray-casting added more graphics fidelity over the conventional rendering pipeline. This is a ray-based rendering technique. However, ray-casting is non-recursive. After the first bounce, it is possible to check whether the hit point is directly illuminated by a light source or not by generating a shadow ray. Therefore, ray-casting is not considered under the Global Illumination genre. Nonetheless, understanding this algorithm would assist to in the learning curve of other algorithms, e.g., recursive ray tracing, path tracing, photon mapping, ReSTIR (Reservoir-based Spatio-Temporal Importance Resampling), etc.