

Show HN: A toy ray tracer in Rust - Twinklebear
https://github.com/Twinklebear/tray_rust

======
tinco
I didn't know that Physically Based Rendering was introduced as a book, and
that book is a literate program (as in, you can compile the book and get a
physically based renderer as a binary) that was so influential that it
received an academy award(!).

There's a video of two famous actors announcing them, being professionals they
explain exactly what the book is about convincingly despite not having a clue
what they are talking about:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d9juPsv1QU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d9juPsv1QU)

In their receiving speech they give a shout out to Donald Knuth for pioneering
literate programming.

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banachtarski
Path tracer. Ray tracer implies a Whitted Ray Tracer. This is clearly using
Monte Carlo sampling and BRDFs to scatter rays using multi-bounce lighting
(hence paths instead of rays)

~~~
CyberDildonics
Ray tracing is just colliding a line with some other goemetric primitive. It
doesn't imply Whitted ray tracing at all. Basically all offline rendering now
in toy renderers to high end production renderers is some sort of physically
based ray tracing, so it is the norm rather than the exception.

~~~
banachtarski
The point is definitely pedantic but the differentiating factor in my mind
isn't whether the ray is physically based or not. The important fact is that
the ray undergoes multiple bounces, so at the end, a pixel isn't lit with a
single ray, but many rays that meet end to end.

