The current , August issue of Scientific American has a very interesting article regarding advances in real-time ray tracing for computer graphics.  I checked the website, but the full article appears in the subscriber area only.  In a year or two, the dream of no longer having to wait forever for a render may  come true.

alleluhiah!

I've seen computers like that. On a show called STAR TREK. I get the feeling some time WARP SPEED will be invented first.

Attached Link: http://www.fantasylab.com/newPages/Welcome.html

as long as there are Bryce renders, someone will find a way to make renders that take forever..;)

Well...

Truespace 7 has real timer rendering...

Then DAZ needs to buy out Caligari. ;o)

Real time rendering, but isn't scanline rather then ray trace?

Doesn't it say in the BRYCE user agreement you must do an overnight render at least once a month?

T7 also has realtime linking...Users can be any where in the world and collaborate on a scene together..One can be pushing and Pulling Vertices while the other is UV mapping it while the model is getting updated live...

Herasy!

Cool attributes for T7! (I hadn't looked at their product page since v6)

Real time rendering, but isn't scanline rather then ray trace?

It's DirectX9 pixel shading, the exmaple image is impressive. LOOK.

Ya I am saveing up to get 2 licences...

This will help in Game building Tremendously...

Within 2-3 years cpu's could be ridiculously powerful. What with the combination of dual cores, hyper-threading, 64-bit cpu/os/apps, motherboards that can accept multiple dual core cpu's, etc, etc.

And, there was some post I made a couple weeks ago about Intel firing up a 500Ghz cpu at room temprature (1000ghz cooled) (Something like that)

It's a good era to be computing in, lol.

Especially when ya can get a core goup....That wants to make mooooolllla...

Attached Link: http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html

I thought you might find this interesting.

The article has a box comparing traditional ray tracing and the real-time

traditional----Ray tracing renders a 3D scene by shooting vitrtual rays through the pixels of the 2D display.  The scene is stored as a database of objects, which can include curved as well as flat surfaces.
When a ray hits an object, the system launches "shadow" rays toward each light source in the scene and rays to test for indirect lighting by other objects.  The ray tracer also checks whether the surface will reflect, refract or simply change the color of the original ray.
Thanks to its recursive nature, this method can render a scene accurately in just one pass.

And now the Real-Time--the article describes 3 kinds of advances
1-Running rays together in parallel now happens at several levels within real-time ray tracers on desktop PCs.
Programs group similar rays into "packets," then march all the rays in a packet in lockstep through the same set of computations.

2-Acceleration structiures split the 3d scene into a hierarchy, called a kD-tree, organized so that each section carries roughly equal computational cost.  Rather than testing every ray against every object, the renderer follows the tree from its trunk to the appropriate "leaf" to find the few objects that the ray might hit

3--Cusotmized microchips built last year at Saarland University run at a mere 66 megahertz in prototype versions yet can render some ray-traced scenes more quickly than a 2,600 megahertz Pentium-4 system
Once it is commercialiezed, the "ray processing unit," or RPU should run roughly 50 times as fast- more than speedy enough for interactive software.

I hope that helps clarify things.

greg