There's two very different things that both use the same word. One of those is a video rendering technique that can produce very high quality photo-realistic images, with real lighting, shadows, reflections, textures, etc. That's not what you want. That's the plugin you got, but that's not what you need.
The other type of raytracing, you do by hand, one painstaking step at a time. Long, slow, boring process, but the only way to check that your room is acoustically sound. You do this type of tracing by drawing out many "rays" that leave the acoustic center of your speaker, at many angles, and seeing where each ray goes: what surfaces in the room does it hit. When a ray hits a surface, you make it "bounce" by drawing the reflected version of that ray, as though the surface was a mirror and the original ray was a laser beam hitting it. So the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence, but flipped over in the opposite direction.
You do that with a whole bunch of rays leaving your speaker at small intervals, such as every 5°, or every 10°, in both directions. After you have done a few dozen of those, you'll be able to get a picture of where the sound is going in your room, what surfaces it is hitting, and where the reflections from those surfaces are going.
After you have done that in the horizontal plane, you then also do it in the vertical plane, because sound is 3D not 2D.
Like I said: very slow, boring, painful, maddening process. It would be nice if there was a plugin to do this type of raytracing for you, but there isn't...
The "picture" can end up looking something like this:
Another way that I've developed to help with this, is a geometric component with colored segments at 5° increments, that I just attach to the acoustic axis of the speaker. It helps to get a quick idea of hos things are working out, and I then use it as the basis for ray-tracing:
- Stuart -
yes i know, just trying...