Saturday, October 3, 2009

Tracing Rays

I have never considered simple rays more precious than I do now and not just because I am building a ray tracer, but because I have recently moved Utrecht, Netherlands and sunlight is a scarce commodity here. I missed the thrill of long lectures and midterm exams, so am student yet again! Game and Media Technology postgraduate at Utrecht University and so far it's great. This brings me back to my ray tracer and no ray tracer is complete without a Cornell Box and some balls, exhibit below:
It sports a vast number of very basic features (hugely popular in ray tracers from the early 90's) like:
  • Phong materials
  • Anti-aliasing
  • Light reflection
  • Light refraction (with Fresnel reflection)
  • Area light and soft shadows
  • Soft reflections
  • and more to come!
The policy of the university on source sharing is "No." so no code pasting this time, but I am open for questions and discussion. I don't think too many people will find the code useful anyhow and plus you can always download POV ray, which is a world class open source ray tracer.

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