I learned a really important life lesson

during my research. You see, I do this kind of thing. This is ray tracing, or a light transport

simulation as we call it. And it has a superpower: what is that? Well, it can simulate reality! Yes.

This is really possible - no AI needed at all. You can give it a scene, and it will simulate

the path of light rays bouncing around, and give you an image of what that

scene would look like in reality. It is absolutely insane that

we can do that. I love it. But wait, not so fast. Even if you do it

perfectly, at first, this is what it looks like. Oh my, this is terrible. What is going

on? Well, that is the life lesson. This was just simulating one ray going

through each of these pixels. That is what we call one sample. One sample is not enough.

If you do two samples, you get something like

this. Better? Maybe a bit. A hundred samples?

Getting better, but still, a long way off. And after millions and millions of rays, we get the beautiful final image. When you

first do it, it is a very emotional moment. When we started, I thought this would

be impossible, and yet here it is. So here is two things I’d like to share with you:

one is a life lesson that I learned. Even if you have the perfect system, at first, it might

seem that it does not work at all. But you have to keep at it. And it may take a long time.

And two, I’d love to share this feeling with you, but it’s impossible, because when you

first succeed, it is beyond words. But wait, I think I found a way to actually share

this feeling with you. Through a song. A popular request from you Fellow Scholars, so here it

is. And if you watch until the end of the video,

I’ll give you something so you can also create

a simulation like this yourself for free. Alright, with that said, this

is Károly and The Papers. That was so much fun, I hope you enjoyed

it as much as we did. I am not sure if I

ever heard a song written about ray tracing.

Alright, I promised you something. And it is for free. I taught this master level course

at the Technical University of Vienna, and I think knowledge should be for free for everyone.

So it’s not like the courses you see elsewhere, it is completely free, in fact you can’t even pay

for it even if you wanted. Although this Fellow Scholar was hilarious. Alright, so in this one,

I try my best to teach you the physics of light, and then we code up a simulation

program together, from scratch. Enjoy!