what is raytracing? I see this term a lot relating to video games and 3D animations

Question

Thanks for the replies everyone, I think I get it now

In: 24

Answer 1

Ray tracing is a way of producing the lighting for a virtual scene in for example a video game. Usually cameras capture all the light that got sent out by the sun and bounced off of all the objects in a scene. Because virtually lighting a sceene this way would be way too inefficient ray tracing is basically doing the reverse – send out “light beams” from the camera and illuminate everything they hit withing a few bounces.
Theres [this really cool exploratory programming video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz0KTGYJtUk) thats quite easy to understand and follow imho if you want to dive a little deeper