rayTracer Element Reference

Classic Whitted-style recursive raytracer. More...

Inheritance diagram for rayTracer:

List of all members.

Attributes
unsigned int	noRenderThreads
	Number of core rendering threads to use during rendering.
unsigned int	noDirectSamples
	Number of direct "shadow rays" to sample from area light sources during evaluation of direct illumination.
generator	directSampleGenerator
generator	generator
	generator to use to generate samples over the film plane
spectrum	ambient
	Ambient illumination spectrum to be used as an approximation to indirect illumination which is not handled by rayCaster.
unsigned int	noIndirectSamples
	Number of secondary samples to generate at an intersection point to approximate indirect illumination.
unsigned int	maxDepth
	Maximum recursion depth.

---

Detailed Description

Classic Whitted-style recursive raytracer.

Note:

For a concise introduction to raytracing, see http://www.raytracing.co.uk/study/ray_intro.htm

rayTracer corresponds to the underlying Milton class 'WhittedRayTracer.'

---

Attribute Documentation

unsigned int rayTracer::noRenderThreads

Number of core rendering threads to use during rendering.

Rendering in Milton is highly concurrent and is designed from the ground up to scale well with an increasing number of processors on the underlying machine. Choosing too few threads will drastically affect the performance of Milton by not taking advantage of all available resources. On the other hand, choosing too many threads may bottleneck the system and cause cache / memory thrashing from frequent time sharing between the threads across an insufficient number of available processors. A good rule of thumb is to choose noRenderThreads to be about 2 times the number of available processors. i.e., if you're on a quad-core machine, setting noRenderThreads to 8 or 10 will yield optional usage of the 4 available processors.

type	unsigned integer
optional	true
default	8

unsigned int rayTracer::noDirectSamples

Number of direct "shadow rays" to sample from area light sources during evaluation of direct illumination.

type	unsigned integer
optional	true
default	1

generator rayTracer::directSampleGenerator

type	generator
optional	true
default	jittered

generator rayTracer::generator

generator to use to generate samples over the film plane

type	generator
optional	true
default	super

spectrum rayTracer::ambient

Ambient illumination spectrum to be used as an approximation to indirect illumination which is not handled by rayCaster.

type	spectrum
optional	true
default	0.1 W/m^2sr

unsigned int rayTracer::noIndirectSamples

Number of secondary samples to generate at an intersection point to approximate indirect illumination.

Note:

The number of rays generated during Whitted-style raytracing grows exponentially with depth, so it's generallly a good idea to keep noIndirectSamples very small (1 or 2).

type	unsigned integer
optional	true
default	1

unsigned int rayTracer::maxDepth

Maximum recursion depth.

Note:

Whitted-style raytracing is biased as an estimator of the rendering equation precisely because it is a finite estimator of an infinite series.

type	unsigned integer
optional	true
default	5