TAPESTRY: The Art of Representation and Abstraction
Ray Tracing Bundles
Raydiosity is not Radiosity
Strata, Inc., the company which developed Stratavision, has confused things a bit with this name for one of it's high-end rendering algorithms which it introduced several years ago. It's not a radiosity rendering, but it does show some of the same visual characteristics.Imagine modifying the basic ray tracing algorithm such that where it used to bounce one reflected ray for each incident one, it now bounces a bundle of rays, clustered around the "true" reflected ray. This bundle begins to approximate diffuse reflection while maintaining a fundamentally ray tracing technique. It yields images which display color bleed AND refraction.
It does take a while. Actually, it takes quite a long while... Well, when you get right down to it, it takes a very long time, since each of those rays in the bundle spawns another bundle when it hits the next surface, etc. That's probably why they took it out of subsequent versions.
Last updated: April, 2014
