CompuServe Messages

Your discussion of ray tracing and speed seems to me to concentrate on relative speeds of raytracers. There are ray tracers that are faster than others. Ray tracers are being sped up. This one ray tracer is even faster than 3ds at raytracing. My experience has been that ray tracing is accepted as an _inherently_ slower process for rendering than the other options out there. And is that not what was originally said? That 3DS is not a ray tracer because to do so would be a speed sacrifice not worth the particular strengths of a ray tracer? >>This is completely dependent on which raytracer you use,<< This is not true. Ray tracing is a known platform and implementation independant technique that can be compared to other techniques without considering specific instances. >> and is a function of how well the code is written and optimized<< This statement is true of anything. Substitute line drawing; z-buffer; or egg scrambling for raytracing, and it holds true _inside_ that given topic. If 3DS had been written to verify data integrity before proceeding on to the next pixel, even Preview mode would be slower than ray tracing on my pocket calculator.