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1. What is ray tracing? | Rendering | Computer animation | Khan Academy

Defines ray tracing as a rendering method and situates it among other ways of turning a 3D scene into a picture. Covers what a ray is and how tracing many of them builds an image pixel by pixel.

Khan Academy Labs · 3 min · Advanced · VFX · VFX · 2016

What you take away

Define ray tracing and identify what problem it solves in rendering.

Watch it

Filed under

Oscar winners for visual effects

Books on visual effects

Kit for this lesson

SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE 8TB — Desktop archive drive built for footage
Corsair 128GB DDR5 kit — For Unreal, caches and twelve open applications
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K — Quick Sync, which some codecs still love
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X — 16 cores — the sweet spot for a cutting room
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 — The sensible half-price render card
Apple Mac mini M4 — The cheapest Mac that cuts 4K without complaint

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