So, is the trick that most of the image is still rasterized but ray tracing is used for the shadows and reflections?

I've always said the word genius is bandied around way too much, and this video is a fine example. CRT screens/tvs follow the same idea - individual lights illuminate in sequence quickly enough to form a static picture, each pixel changes very slightly 100 times per second (refresh rate) to give the illusion of the original picture in motion. The CRT beam scans ("rasters") from top left to bottom right (for example) in exactly the same way that the device in the video spins (it rasters in a circle) and however many times it spins per second is the refresh rate.

It's a cool project and his PCB work is nice, and he's done a good job of translating a picture into a timed set of lights. The videographer uses the term genius because he was not previously aware of the long history of rasters. This would be a useful tool for teaching children about the process - CRTs might not be popular anymore, but CCDs are fundamental to (astro)physics, and the principles behind both cover a huge range of potential teaching topics.

Not ray-tracing, just standard DX11 rastering with lots of post-processing. This is what it takes for real-time raytracing currently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2VB8vGIbwY

>> ^artician:

>> ^oohlalasassoon:
Mine still works
Games I have are Blitz, Star Trek, Spike, Clean Sweep, and Scramble (my favorite).
And despite the title of the vid, I don't think the raster-graphics that Vectrex uses are considered pixels.

Actually, rasterization is the term for putting an image to a pixelized format, usually a file or other read-only format to be displayed as it is.
I think what you meant to say was "vector" graphics, as vectors were what the Vectrex was designed around.
Either way, all graphics use pixels in the end, as that is the raw building block of the digital image, so the title of this is something of a misnomer if taken literally. It's a bit like saying "paperless sketch", or something.
Vector processing is basically the precursor for polygonal rendering and the real-time 3D we are used to seeing today. The primary difference to raster images being that it is drawn and manipulated in real-time, as opposed to raster-imagery being a simple, unalterable record of an image in pixels (like a recording).
I fail at the metaphors, but you get what I'm saying.


Whoops. I did indeed mean to say vector, not raster. Raster's actually what I think of when I think of pixels, so I said the opposite of what I meant. Long day. Thanks for your informative reply

>> ^oohlalasassoon:

Mine still works
Games I have are Blitz, Star Trek, Spike, Clean Sweep, and Scramble (my favorite).
And despite the title of the vid, I don't think the raster-graphics that Vectrex uses are considered pixels.


Actually, rasterization is the term for putting an image to a pixelized format, usually a file or other read-only format to be displayed as it is.
I think what you meant to say was "vector" graphics, as vectors were what the Vectrex was designed around.

Either way, all graphics use pixels in the end, as that is the raw building block of the digital image, so the title of this is something of a misnomer if taken literally. It's a bit like saying "paperless sketch", or something.

Vector processing is basically the precursor for polygonal rendering and the real-time 3D we are used to seeing today. The primary difference to raster images being that it is drawn and manipulated in real-time, as opposed to raster-imagery being a simple, unalterable record of an image in pixels (like a recording).

I fail at the metaphors, but you get what I'm saying.

Mine still works

Games I have are Blitz, Star Trek, Spike, Clean Sweep, and Scramble (my favorite).

And despite the title of the vid, I don't think the rastervector -graphics that Vectrex uses are considered pixels.

Agreed. What I was looking for was how much of the progression we've already surpassed in realtime rasterization, but with such a giant leap it's not informative.

We've safely surpassed the Warcraft 1 & 2 rendering, while we're almost at the level of the Warcraft 3 cinematics (which would have been unthinkable at the time).

The rest we're not even close; but we will be one day.

Why on earth is he using PhotoShop? It's a raster program, and handles vectors very poorly (that's what Illustrator's for!) - obviously, this guy's not in the design industry. And if you wanted to be really quick, you can use Illustrator CS2's Auto-Trace function to do it for you. I've used Adobe software for over eight years - the StreamLine based Auto-Trace is actually surprisingly accurate (but I don't recommend it to my students - as they're lazy enough as it is!)

Plus, technically: it's not a vector image...as he's rasterized the mathematics into pixels to add shading.