11 Facts About Ray casting

Ray casting greatly simplified image rendering of 3D objects and scenes because a line transforms to a line.

Ray casting is the most basic of many computer graphics rendering algorithms that use the geometric algorithm of ray tracing.

Ray casting tracing-based rendering algorithms operate in image order to render three-dimensional scenes to two-dimensional images.

The speed and simplicity of ray casting comes from computing the color of the light without recursively tracing additional rays that sample the radiance incident on the point that the ray hit.

Idea behind ray casting is to trace rays from the eye, one per pixel, and find the closest object blocking the path of that ray – think of an image as a screen-door, with each square in the screen being a pixel.

One important advantage ray casting offered over older scanline algorithms was its ability to easily deal with non-planar surfaces and solids, such as cones and spheres.

Ray casting is simply a straight line in the 3D space of the camera model.

Three algorithms using ray casting are to make line drawings, to make shaded pictures, and to compute volumes and other physical properties.

Roth's ray casting system generated the images of solid objects on the right.

Ray casting procedure starts at the top of the solid composition tree, recursively descends to the bottom, classifies the ray with respect to the primitive solids, and then returns up the tree combining the classifications of the left and right subtrees.

Ray casting is a natural modeling tool for making shaded pictures.