Is there software available that can ray-trace BMP files so that they look nice just like in modern 2D games? Many games nowadays that don''t use 3D graphics say that their graphics are ray-traced - and I have looked at the BMP files in the "DATA" folders of such games - they look photo-realistic, and they are obviously high-color bitmaps.

You can d'load a free raytracer at the POV-Ray site.

Get a good model program (like Blender and a prog to convert the 3D models to .POV files.

But I must warn you, it's much work to get some nice pics!

Edited by - richardve on July 30, 2000 6:18:58 PM

But the benefits are well worth the effort... I love POV-Ray


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What exactly are ray-traced bitmaps ?

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Yeah, ncsu121978, I was wondering the same thing.

Also, what games have used ray-traced bitmaps?

is it when u create an image or object in a 3d modeler and then u tell the program to ray trace it as a 2d image?

Ray-traced bitmap is when you render the model in something like POV-Ray or 3D Studio Max, resample the image to a suitable size and then just store the bitmap in the game. This gives the high-quality look of a rendered image but without the real-time rendering cost in terms of processing power. The limitation is that you do not have the freedom that a true 3D model would give you.

Very pretty sprite graphics in other words.

If I render my bitmaps with POV-Ray, will I be able to save the results as BMP files so that I can easily load them into my 2D DirectX game?

yup.

but the thing that i find anyoing with POV-RAY is that it is *gasp* TEXTBASED!!!

But, hey! it''s free and produce great results (if you have the energy to write it all down)

Now when i think about it, isnt there some sort of modeller for POV? Moray or something




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Yes there are a few, I forget the names though! Maybe POVCAD or something like that. And I think Moray is another one (can't remember though).

There's one called POV Scene Builder which isn't too bad, and I've used it before... There was another that had some better features (maybe it was POVCAD? or something) but it was really buggy, to the point that it was unusable. That was awhile ago so it might be alot better now...

Also make sure you get POV-Ray for -Windows-, not the DOS version... I've used both and believe me, Windows is soo much nicer.

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Edited by - Tebriel on July 31, 2000 2:01:54 PM