Re:Hallucinations re: the rendering of Cyberpunk 2077
by simias on Thursday December 17, 2020 @06:00PM
(#25461655)
You can learn quite a lot by writing a toy raytracer with things like textures, shadows, bump mapping and the like.
Of course raytracers don't work like polygonal hardware rendering but a lot of the maths and concept do carry over I've found. If you understand how normal mapping and reflections work in a software Raytracer you shouldn't have too much trouble implementing the same algorithms in a hardware accelerated pixel shader for instance.
In general I think that implementing a raytracer is just one of these projects that's just too cool and simple not to do, so I don't think you'll be wasting your time anyway.
Of course raytracers don't work like polygonal hardware rendering but a lot of the maths and concept do carry over I've found. If you understand how normal mapping and reflections work in a software Raytracer you shouldn't have too much trouble implementing the same algorithms in a hardware accelerated pixel shader for instance.
In general I think that implementing a raytracer is just one of these projects that's just too cool and simple not to do, so I don't think you'll be wasting your time anyway.