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Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

(pbr-book.org)
218 points ahamez | 2 comments | 13 Jan 25 14:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.431s | source
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crispyambulance ◴[16 Jan 25 17:56 UTC] No.42728529[source]▶
Every time I see stuff like this it makes me think about optical design software.

There are applications (Zemax, for example) that are used to design optical systems (lens arrangements for cameras, etc). These applications are eye-wateringly expensive-- like similar in pricing to top-class EDA software licenses.

With the abundance GPU's and modern UI's, I wonder how much work would be involved for someone to make optical design software that blows away the old tools. It would be ray-tracing, but with interesting complications like accounting for polarization, diffraction, scattering, fluorescence, media effects beyond refraction like like birefringence and stuff like Kerr and Pockels, etc.

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fooker ◴[16 Jan 25 20:45 UTC] No.42730664[source]▶
Well, everyone who can build this niche software is already employed to build it.
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1. crispyambulance ◴[16 Jan 25 21:31 UTC] No.42731160[source]▶
Yeah, perhaps.

But the heavy-hitters in this field all seem to have very old-timey UI's and out-of-this-world pricing.

Meanwhile, raytracing for computer graphics on GPU's is soooo performant-- it makes me wonder how much work needs to be done to make the equivalent of KiCAD for optical design.

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2. fooker ◴[17 Jan 25 18:57 UTC] No.42741956[source]▶
You're missing the point. The difficulty is not in the ray tracing, etc. It is in understanding the domain of the software and what needs to be done to make it useful.

I completely agree that whatever simulation they have can be easily done better with modern GPUs.