Still worthwhile in my opinion! But full disclosure, I happen to be working on ray tracing problems.
Writing them is still really fun, it’s no less useful today for learning things than it was 20 years ago. You can get amazing pictures with not very much code, and the algorithms are really satisfying to understand & implement.
There are also still tons of low hanging fruit. You’d think the easy problems would be mined out by now, but they’re not. New developments are actively happening with intersection primitives, color handling, sampling, direct lighting, shadowing, the list goes on. If you want to do research, you don’t have to dive that deep to find something unsolved that is solveable.
For an oblique cone intersection, I don’t know the right answer, but the oblique cone is a skew transform of a regular cone, right? You might be able to use a regular cone intersector, but pre-transform the ray by the inverse skew transform?
Writing them is still really fun, it’s no less useful today for learning things than it was 20 years ago. You can get amazing pictures with not very much code, and the algorithms are really satisfying to understand & implement.
There are also still tons of low hanging fruit. You’d think the easy problems would be mined out by now, but they’re not. New developments are actively happening with intersection primitives, color handling, sampling, direct lighting, shadowing, the list goes on. If you want to do research, you don’t have to dive that deep to find something unsolved that is solveable.
For an oblique cone intersection, I don’t know the right answer, but the oblique cone is a skew transform of a regular cone, right? You might be able to use a regular cone intersector, but pre-transform the ray by the inverse skew transform?
This resource is fantastic for finding intersection building blocks and code examples: http://www.realtimerendering.com/intersections.html