Ray tracing has established itself in recent years as the most general image synthesis algorithm. Researchers have investigated ray-surface intersection calculations for a number of surface primitives, including checkerboards, glass balls, green fractal hills, mandrills, abstract blue surfaces, more glass balls, robot arms, pool balls, low-resolution clouds, morphine molecules, aquatic blobby things making strange noises, fantastic cities, and running skeletons. Unfortunately, nobody has ray traced any food. The Dessert Realism Project here at Pixar is addressing this problem. This paper presents new technology for ray tracing Jell-O® brand gelatin. We believe the method may have application to other brands of gelatin and perhaps pudding as well.

invited to appear in Communications of the ACM, Feb. 1988, pp. 131 - 134