PovRay

[Reticle]

Anyone ever use it? Works great for creating original, photorealistic images.

[Steve]

never heard of it before :/

checked out the site > http://www.povray.org/
looks pretty cool

[Reticle]

Yeah, the whole concept of raytracing is just brilliant. I figure the best graphics engine ever built will be a real time raytracing engine. At that point, it just can't get any better!

[Steve]

hehe check this Ret > http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter/

Until now every 3D Shooter has been completly rendered in software or using common rasterization hardware. As a scientific study Saarland University developed in cooperation with Erlangen University the worlds first completly ray traced 3D Shooter.

As base for this kind of game Quake 3: Arena Demo from id Software has been choosen.

The game engine was written from scratch and supports player and bot movement including shooting and jumping, collision detection, and many sepcial effects like jump-pads and teleporters. The main development was done by Daniel Pohl in less than six months with contribution for shading by several other students (see feature list). The engine builds upon the OpenRT-API, which manages the ray tracing.

[Reticle]

Wow. Hardware raytracing. Now there's an idea!