A Distributed Data Model for Raytracing

Ray tracing is a superior method for producing realistic images. It can take into account all natural phenomena covered by classical ray optics in image formation, and that without any extra modeling effort. The main disadvantage is its high cost in terms of computer time. Production of ray traced images of reasonably complex scenes takes long in real time with a moderate general purpose computer [Whi80). The basic idea of ray tracing is the brute force algorithm for simulating the path of a ray of light in the whole model space. As no global information of the model is used to anticipate the interactions of the ray with model elements, every ray must be tested against every object and most of the processing time is consumed to ray-object intersection calculation. At each intersection found the ray is divided into reflected and refracted components and into a ray directed to each light source to produce shadows. Higher quality images need more pixels to be calculated and the number of elements in a scene grows linearly with model complexity, leading to steep increase of the computational complexity of the whole problem.