I certainly wasn’t trying to imply that people who write raytracers are ignorant of optics. I’m pretty sure the two are mutally exclusive. It just seemed like something that had been passed over- and like you said, for good reason- since it was so slow. My goal was more to expose the issue to those who don’t write/work on raytracers. People like me.

Out of Curiosity, is your Raytracer publicly available? If so, where can I find it? I always enjoy reading through all the different approaches to the raytracing problem.

~~Joe

Given time, I would like to add prism effects to my own raytracer, since I think they add a lot to some scenes. I likely will never add the double slit effect, since I cannot image a scene I’d want to render that really needs it.

Look, someone who knows what there doing!

Thats wicked cool, I’ll have to read up on spectral rendering, Optics is fun

Anyway, you’re absolutely correct that standard ray tracing is based around classical optics. Specifically, it’s based on the branch called “geometric optics.”

As for what you describe about ray tracing based on the wavelengths, we call that “spectral rendering”. There are various ways to handle the representation of the spectra for it. But once you have that, the conversion to RGB is fairly well known. It basically involves integrating the product of the computed spectra for the ray with each of the CIE tristimulus curves to reduce it to a color in the CIE XYZ color space. From there, ignoring color calibration, it’s a simple linear transformation to get to one of the RGB color spaces.

In addition to the prismatic dispersion, spectral renderers can often handle things like chromatic aberration, thin film interference, and some degree of diffraction grating type effects.

As for the anonymous commenters wave tracer idea, there’s been a tiny amount of work in that area. I know there was a paper in the SIGGRAPH 94 about simulating wavefronts to compute global illumination. More recently, this year’s SIGGRAPH had a paper on eikonal rendering which seems to be related. Neither one will really reproduce the double slit effect, but they are at least a tad closer than the standard geometric optics approach.

Hmm, I didn’t know Povray had a dispersion effect- I guess thats just the nature of such a big system. That said- thats wicked cool. WRT The Prism Effect, I suppose it just seemed counterintuitive to me that a wave could slow down, to be honest- I have a hard time grasping how waves (that is, an infinitely long wavetrain) can move at all. Back with dispersion, I’ll have to read up on it some. Thanks!

I don’t know if that gives you anything as far as rendering prisms (I think you’d probably still trace only one wavelength at a time…), but it would give you a working double slit experiment.

Of course, POV-Ray works by ray tracing. It wouldn’t make much sense to render a macroscopic scene by adding countless waves.

It’s perfectly possible to explain Snell’s law with a wave model of light. See Huygens’ Principle. Certainly the speed of a wave can vary locally.

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