From 1989 through 1994 I worked on 3D graphics at Apple Computer.

QuickDraw 3D

Exploiting Temporal Coherence For Faster Rendering of Animation

I spent many years studying ray tracing. My thesis was titled "Adaptive Voxel Subdivision" and describes my algorithm for accelerating ray propogation through scenes using a hybrid uniform voxel/adaptive octree approach.

I also did a fair bit of work on parallel ray tracing. I've explored simple techniques such as replicating the entire scene database on all processors and distributing the rays to be rendered across the CPUs, up to systems which distribute the scene over the processors (thereby making full use of the large amounts of memory available on a distributed machine) and either propogate rays or collect local caches of relevant scene geometry while rendering a ray on each processor.

I did some work with Andrew Pearce at Alias Research on shadow caching to accelerate shadown tracing. Prior to being the king of rendering at Alias, Andrew wrote a thesis on parallel ray tracing using ray propogation.

Here are some quick and crude images from my adaptive voxel subdivision ray tracer. It currently supports the VRML, 3DMF, NFF, and Alias file formats.

• Howard Rheingold, author of "Virtual Reality".
• You can learn more about rendering from Mark's fine homepage.
• 3D Site.
• Silicon Graphics, Inc.
  • Alias Research
  • Wavefront
• Side Effects.
• LightScape radiosity rendering.
• Macintosh 3D Links
  • Specular International
  • Ray Dream
• VRML, the SGI Inventor-based Virtual Reality Modeling Language, is a hyperlinkable modelling language for the web. There are now several 3D viewers such as:
  • SGI's WebSpace
  • Paper's WebFX
  • Whurlwind for the Power Macintosh.