Computer-generated effects are becoming increasingly more realistic on the big screen, but these animations generally take hours to render. Now, Adobe Systems, the company famous for tools like Photoshop and Acrobat Reader, is developing software that could bring the power of a Hollywood animation studio to the average computer and let users render high-quality graphics in real time. Such software could be useful for displaying ever-more-realistic computer games on PCs and for allowing the average computer user to design complex and lifelike animations.

Adobe is focusing its efforts on ray tracing, a rendering technique that considers the behavior of light as it bounces off objects. Since it takes so long to render, ray tracing is typically used for precomputed effects that are added to films, computer games, and even still pictures before they reach the consumer, explains Gavin Miller, senior principal scientist at Adobe.

With the rise of multicore computing, Miller says, more consumers have machines with the capability to compute ray-tracing algorithms. The challenge now, he says, is to find the best way to divvy up the graphics processes within general microprocessors. "Adobe's research goal is to discover the algorithms that enhance ray-tracing performance and make it accessible to consumers in near real-time form," Miller says.

Consumer computers and video-game consoles compute graphics using an approach called rasterization, explains John Hart, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rasterization renders a scene by generating only those pixels that will be visible to a viewer. This process is fast, but it doesn't allow for much realism, explains Hart. "Rasterization is limited in the kinds of visual effects it can produce, and has to be extensively customized just to be able to approximate the appearance of complicated reflective and translucent objects that ray tracing handles nicely." For instance, in real life, if a light is shining at the side of a car, some of that illumination could reflect off metal in the undercarriage, and this would create a reflection on the ground that's visible to a viewer who's looking at the car from above. Rasterization would ignore the pixels that make up the undercarriage, however, and the reflection would be lost.

Ray tracing takes a fundamentally different approach from rasterization, explains Miller. "Rather than converting each object into its pixel representation, it takes all of the geometry in the scene and stores it in a highly specialized database," he says. This database is designed around performing the following fundamental query: given a ray of light, what points on a surface does it collide with first? By following a ray of light as it bounces around an entire scene, designers can capture subtle lighting cues, such as the bending of light through water or glass, or the multiple reflections and shadows cast by shiny three-dimensional objects such as an engine or a car.