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From: fredc@bmcg.UUCP (Fred Cordes)
Newsgroups: net.graphics
Subject: ray casting
Message-ID: <1858@bmcg.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Sep-85 11:33:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: bmcg.1858
Posted: Mon Sep  9 11:33:17 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Sep-85 12:03:56 EDT
Organization: Burroughs Corp. ASG, San Diego, CA.
Lines: 17


  I first saw ray casting/ray tracing at SIGGRAPH 83. I listened to James
  Kajiya's paper presentation but was unable to appreciate much more than 
  his joke about the tera-flop clib. I've got the proceedings from that
  SIGGRAPH and '85 with papers about ray tracing that I'm really having
  trouble understanding. Can anyone out there offer a few pointers or 
  simpler explanation? I've been working with 2D graphics for a couple of
  years now and I understand the basics of tranformations and object 
  descriptions based on vectors.

  The problem is I can't get a handle on how objects are described when they're
  ray traced. I understand the idea of casting rays from the eye/viewpoint to
  individual pixels, but I simply can't extract how objects are described from
  the references to Jacobians and Newton's method in the papers. Anyone care 
  to post a generalized explanation to the net?

  Thanks much, Fred Cordes