The Rendering Industry

Abstract

The rending industry, and ray tracing specifically is an enigma in that it looks like a start-up industry with dozens of supplies making it ripe for consolidation, and yet it’s been in existence since the mid-1980s—hardly a start-up situation. That is partially due to the relative ease of generating a ray tracing program—the math is very straight forward and easy to understand and code. But more so because of the quest for efficiency and the unending demand for material libraries. One of the reasons there are so many ray tracing programs available is because of the industry-specific material libraries each program has. Big companies with CAD and 3D modeling main-line programs will have two to four in-house ray tracing programs of their own, plus a half dozen plug-ins that work with the main program. It’s not uncommon for a studio for example to employ four to six different ray tracing programs in the production of the movie, using each one for a particular look.