2008

Ray-Traced Shadows
Example of ray-traced shadows
Ray-traced shadows are generated by tracing the path of rays sampled from a
light source. Ray-traced shadows are more accurate than shadow-mapped
shadows
on page 7927 . They always produce a hard edge.
Ray-traced shadows are more realistic for transparent and translucent objects.
Also, only ray-tracing can generate shadows for wireframe objects.
Because ray-traced shadows are calculated without a map, you don't have to
adjust resolution as you do for shadow-mapped shadows. The parameters for
ray-traced shadows adjust the shadow's position (known as
ray-trace bias on
page 7906 ) and the depth of the
quadtree on page 7904 used to calculate ray
tracing.
Advanced ray-traced shadows are the same as ray-traced shadows, however
they provide
antialiasing on page 7708 control, letting you fine-tune how
ray-traced shadows are generated.
RAYHOSTS File
The RAYHOSTS file is a text (ASCII) file that lists the name of host systems
capable of
mental ray rendering on page 6039 in a distributed network. You
turn on distributed rendering on the Render Scene dialog > Processing panel
> Distributed Bucket Rendering rollout on page 6131 .
Glossary | 7907