Find out what you cannot do and then go do it no diggity!
If you go with the ray tracer, pick up Glassner's Introduction to Ray tracing. It's an awesome read, though perhaps outdated, and everything we learned in class is covered in the introductory chapter.
I'll probably get around to the tracer eventually, but there are questions that need to be answered before I go buy a textbook on the subject. Like how to create complex meshes. Is it worth the trouble to roll my own tool to help create them? Should I rely on third-party software? Is it even worth my time to try to create my own meshes? Should I upgrade my hardware? What the hell do I need a ray tracer for anyway? Am I actually smart enough for any of this?
Ray Tracers are conceptually simple and the advantage is learning how to roll your own. If you are forming the next great startup, sure! Leverage your synergies ... but I think the joy of the trace is in learning the cool mathematical manipulations required to model some aspect of light, realistically or not, and then stumbling down some sane attempt at implementation.
Picking somebody else's format makes the appropriation of other people's scenes easier, but that's a parsing task, it's a side requirement for what you're really trying to do.
When I say 'complex models', I don't mean light. I'm talking about meshes - things I can't represent with transformations of spheres and cubes. Creating anything with more than fifty vertices takes special software, and I have to wonder, is it really worth reinventing the wheel on that? And also, what if I want to do skinning, or cloth, or physics?
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If you go with the ray tracer, pick up Glassner's Introduction to Ray tracing. It's an awesome read, though perhaps outdated, and everything we learned in class is covered in the introductory chapter.
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I'll probably get around to the tracer eventually, but there are questions that need to be answered before I go buy a textbook on the subject. Like how to create complex meshes. Is it worth the trouble to roll my own tool to help create them? Should I rely on third-party software? Is it even worth my time to try to create my own meshes? Should I upgrade my hardware? What the hell do I need a ray tracer for anyway? Am I actually smart enough for any of this?
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Picking somebody else's format makes the appropriation of other people's scenes easier, but that's a parsing task, it's a side requirement for what you're really trying to do.
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Answer: no diggity!
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