World's first ray-traced PC game and movie to arrive in 2012

[dtewi]

NJ5 said:

Keep_the_change said:
I've read about ray tracing, seen videos of it on youtube, saw message boards about it and I still not getting what it is about and what so impressive about it.

It's an image rendering technique which works by tracing an independent ray of light for each pixel in the rendered image. This ray can realistically bounce off (or shine through) all kinds of materials and light sources, which results in very realistic lighting and material effects when done right.

You can see some impressive examples of raytraced images here:

http://hof.povray.org/

For example:

 

 

Holy fuck, that is the most realistic thing I've ever seen besides life.