Ray Tracing - polygon rendering and ray tracing methods

"Ray tracing" is a technique of following the light by the eye to the light source. While ray casting only relates itself along with getting the visible surfaces of objects, ray tracing takes that some steps further and in fact tries to determine what each visible surface looks like. Though it will cost your processor time spend in computations you can identify the level of computations involved in ray tracing as in this instance,

Let's assume that we are rendering i.e. ray tracing as a scene at a resolution of 320 pixels wide through 240 pixels high, for a total of 76,800 pixels. Suppose that it be of low complexity, along with merely 20 objects. It means, over the course of creating such picture, the ray tracer will have finish 20 intersection tests for all of those 76,800 pixels, for a total of 1,536,000 intersection tests! Actually, most ray tracers spend most of their time computing these intersections of rays along with objects; wherever from 75 to 95 percent of a ray tracer's time is spent along with these calculations. Separately from these types of hectic calculations, there is the good news, there are methods to reduce the number of intersection tests per ray, and also raise the speed of each intersection test. As well to this the bad news which is, ray tracing complicates things much more than easily ray casting does.

Ray tracing permits you to create numerous kinds of consequences i.e. very complicated or even impossible to perform with the other methods. Such effects comprise three items general to every ray tracer as: transparency, shadows, and reflection. In the subsequent paragraphs, we will discuss how such effects fit naturally in Ray tracing.