Forum Discussion
Creating fisheye views with the Unity3D engine
I have been posting for some time here and at MTBS3D that we really need to stop doing the Rift pre-warp so late in the rendering pipeline (which adds more distortion artifacts of its own, that people...
"Pokey" wrote:
Perhaps slightly off topic, but what is the difference between ray tracing and path tracing?
I've written a ray tracer, but I've never heard the term path tracing before.
A quick google search made it appear that people use the terms interchangeably, though one website seemed to imply ray tracing was just path tracing with 0 bounces, meaning I guess I wrote a path tracer?
Path tracing is a newer ADVANCED form of ray tracing. Google knows that I am interested in this stuff, so it gives me custom search results containing TONS of useful information about this. The "information bubble" effect is isolating you to only things that google knows you may be interested in (which apparently did not include path tracing, in the past).
More about the "Filter Bubble":
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
More about Path Tracing:
""- the city scene has 750 instanced animated characters (30k triangles each, in total 22.5 million animated triangles), all of them physics driven with Bullet physics in a 600k triangle city.
- the Piazza scene is fantastic to test color bleeding, there are 16384 instances of a 846k triangle city, 13.8 billion triangles in total, rendered in real-time.
- interior scene from Octane Render, created by Enrico Cerica, 1 million triangles rendered in real-time.
Real-time path traced virtual reality with Brigade:
Notice that the video above is rendered in REAL-TIME, using computer equipment many of us already own.
You really should train Google that you are interested in this sort of stuff by searching for it (often) and things related to it...
This path-tracing stuff is the REAL future of VR. The current method of Rift pre-warp is just a temporary workaround to get us by for now, as long as we are willing to accept its limitations.
So, the short answer to your question is no, path tracing is nothing like ray-tracing, other than being a complete replacement for it and for the newer radiosity rendering methods as well.