Tracing out a Path to Advanced Rendering

Our last stop on our Extended Topics, Extended tour is with musician, engineer, and graphics wizard Erich Loftis. He’s going to guide us with the story of his journey to achieving Real-Time Path Tracing (RTPT) with Babylon.js. RTPT – also referred to as Ray Tracing or just RT – is a rendering technique built on top of Path Tracing that companies such as Nvidia and AMD are only just beginning to make available in AAA commercial titles, and only in select ways. Through the retelling of Erich’s journey, the reason why the technique has been so difficult to accomplish in real-time games and simulations will hopefully become abundantly clear.

Ray Tracing and its History by Erich Loftis

RT is a technique for rendering realistic images and effects on a computer. It follows the laws of optics and models how physical light rays behave in the real world. Therefore, RT can produce truly photo-realistic images. RT is the...