They’re both overloaded terms, but with today’s common usage, path tracing is built on top of ray tracing, so path tracing in a sense is ray tracing (but not the other way around). So while it’s true that they’re not exactly the same, if that’s what you meant, your sentence as written can be easily misinterpreted.
Is there a reason to make this distinction here? The site & book are doing ray tracing, so the title is accurate. It mentions path tracing once at the very beginning, because the end goal is a path tracer. I think the goal is achieved, so in this case the book is both ray tracing and path tracing.
> Is there a reason to make this distinction here?
The original method, by Whitted, that looked much better than any previous methods, and yet looks horrible by today's standards, is ray tracing. It had no global illumination.
The method based on solving, explicitly or implicitly, the rendering equation by James Kajiya, and one that has built-in global illumination, is path tracing.
The distinction is not important for buzzword hijacking hacks, marketing gimmickers, and snake oil salesmen.
dahart|5 years ago
Is there a reason to make this distinction here? The site & book are doing ray tracing, so the title is accurate. It mentions path tracing once at the very beginning, because the end goal is a path tracer. I think the goal is achieved, so in this case the book is both ray tracing and path tracing.
fizixer|5 years ago
The original method, by Whitted, that looked much better than any previous methods, and yet looks horrible by today's standards, is ray tracing. It had no global illumination.
The method based on solving, explicitly or implicitly, the rendering equation by James Kajiya, and one that has built-in global illumination, is path tracing.
The distinction is not important for buzzword hijacking hacks, marketing gimmickers, and snake oil salesmen.