Distributed Raytracing - Depth of Field, Anti-Aliasing

By Eddie Tavarez

Introduction

When rendering scenes it is often the case that one wants to mirror that of the real world.  This includes everything from depth of focus, reflection, and refraction.  The following page demonstrates distributed raytracing techniques to account for the pre-mentioned.

Anti-Aliasing

Anti aliasing creates images that seem more realistic.  The problem with standard ray tracing is that the images have jaggies and appear unrealistic.  To counter-act this, anti aliasing is used.  Anti-aliasing is implemented by casting extra rays per pixel and averaging them out to produce a more accurate scene.  The following is an image without anti-aliasing:

With anti-aliasing the image appears more clear:

Depth of Field:

To account for actual images that a camera might view, depth of focus portrays realistic images.  Depth of field allows for focusing on objects to create depth.  It is implemented by treating the lens as a surface area as opposed to a point like most raytracing implementations.  The following demonstrates an image that is rendered normally without depth of field implemented:

With  depth of the field implemented the image looks like this: