You asked for it (well, at least Patrick did. :)
It appears that Renderman is a scanline rendering engine. Renderman is VERY popular and information can be found all over the net on it.
Quick reading seems to indicate that scanline renderers are an order of magnitude faster than ray tracers, but also an order of magnitude slower than polygon renderers.
Scanline renderers do reflection and refraction easily, and also provide good shadows, though not diffuse shadows, which are best done with ray tracing. There might be ways to overcome this (shadow maps?), but I don't know what the speed/implementation costs are.
Ray Tracing News was an EXCELLENT source of information, though a lot of graphobabble (to coin a new term.)
lysator.liu.se
I also came across an algorithm called S-buffer. Very interesting.
cs.bu.edu
(The base of that URL (through /Quake) is another good spot, which also includes a reference to the 3D Engine List, where one could spend days. :)
cg.cs.tu-berlin.de
Why did you do this to me Patrick? I see hours upon hours of my time spent weeding through these Web threads I've stumbled upon. Alas! |
