Alberto's Blog

Fun at 700MHz: RayWarping renders

So I bought a K7 at 700MHz which is still working 24/7 as server at my home and then put it to work: ray tracing rules, I felt that at a very deep level, so I immediately concentrated all my efforts on making a real-time ray tracing engine. It was a little tricky at 700MHz and so it teach me interesting things. This engine was called RayWarping, it was able to move in real-time at low resolution and also synthesising HQ static images usually in less than 10 seconds. To support fast ray tracing I developed a spatial partition I called CNP (Cubic Neighbor Partition). It was in essence a non uniform grid with each face of each cell communicated with each neighbor trough a 2D binary spatial partition. Here are some examples of static images (for real-time videos see next post):