I took a computer graphics course (graduate level) this past year. We spent the semester building a ray tracer and adding features to it. We built everything from scratch in C++, presumably for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of the underlying data structures and algorithms. Here’s my question: If I were to get a job in industry with computer graphics, would people think I was crazy if I started building everything from the ground up for ray tracing like this? Are there graphics libraries and frameworks similar to OpenGL which support ray tracing? Does OpenGL itself support ray tracing?
My professor for the course is an expert in the fundamentals of computer graphics theory and the relevant mathematics, but doesn’t have any understanding of modern frameworks and libraries which are used by professionals for computer graphics. She’s more of a scientist than a practitioner.
If I were to use a library to help me out with ray tracing, it would probably be good if it supported distributing the computations to a cluster of computers. I could also use a book recommendation, if you know of one which would help bridge this gap in my understanding.
Although I’m sure there are a number of specialized commercial products, I think overall the most widely used package is the open-source POVRay. POVRay is powerful, easy to use, scriptable and extensible, and it can do an amazing range of things out of the box. Check out their site for an enormous gallery of ray-traced art, including the scripts used to create some fantastic pieces.
This reads like astroturf, but I swear, I’m just a happy user.