Quake IV Ray Traced

[Haven]

Oooh purdy:

 

[elDiablo]

Shame that the Quake 3 version of this project took 20 AMD XP1800s together in order to get it "real-time" (which, in the graphics industry is anything over 6FPS). I hate to think what this would need...

 

[Gibsonfire]

I'm confused, what is the project? Is it to make creatures like that all mirror-like?

 

[elDiablo]

The project is to get real-time ray tracing using the Quake 4 engine.

Wikipedia says this about Ray-Tracing:

Ray tracing [...] mean a specific rendering algorithmic approach in 3D computer graphics, where mathematically-modelled visualisations of programmed scenes are produced using a technique which follows rays from the eyepoint outward, rather than originating at the light sources. It produces results similar to ray casting and scanline rendering, but facilitates more advanced optical effects, such as accurate simulations of reflection and refraction, and is still efficient enough to frequently be of practical use when such high quality output is sought.

Which pretty much means: fire a ray of light for every pixel on the image (though some models use a higher resolution, and average down to the screen resolution to produce smoother lines), and follow the path taken by it. For every object the light hits, find the rule associated with it (opaque objects will reflection/refract the light, while non-opaque ones will reflect it).

It's uber to look at (like the lovely image above) but takes AGES to compute (due to the fact that you are doing a lot of maths, and a lot rule finding). Hence, the project is trying to make ray-tracing within the Quake4 engine in real time. By using lots of computers, but if it works, it'll look great!

Edit - PRETTY PICTURE! Done with ray tracing.

There are also lots of free ray tracing problems out there for you to use. A great one is POV-Ray. Quite easy to pick up and makes things like this: