Hacker News Reader

The Terminator 2 movie is a prime example of using envroinment maps which are supported by OpenGL since day one. There is zero raytracing used in this movie. This shows again that from a psychovisual viewpoint 100% accurate reflections are utterly pointless.

Hardware manufacturers should focus on things that really matter which is texture resolution and geometric detail.

View on HN

T2 was rendering static environments, not interactive ones in real time. And they used something like 600 SGI computers and months of rendering time to do it. To get that level of graphics in an interactive environment you can't fake it. You need ray-tracing or something similar.

As for texture resolution and geometric detail... improvements there are great as well. It's not a "one or the other" choice.

Not that any of this matters with regard to Playcanvas because there's no way to access the RTX's ray-tracing pipeline from WebGL.

I feel like you don't know what you are talking about. Do you know what a cubemap is, how to generate one, and how to use it to render reflections?

it wasn't ray-traced. It was done with renderman. At the time it didn't support raytracing.

https://vfxblog.com/2017/08/23/the-tech-of-terminator-2-an-o...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com