The Ray Tracer Challenge

Yesterday I finished the Weekend Ray Tracer book. I added dielectric materials and depth of field to my Ray Tracer:

Boomers
Dude... deep.
OMNI GLASS
Vast

I had a blast with this project, and I’ll be able to re-use most of the code on minirt. If you’re interested about the math I explain most of the equations used in the projects README:

Today I’ll probably start The Ray Tracer Challenge book, which they recommend for the minirt. I’ll probably skip a chunk of it since my ray tracer already handles most of what it needs to do. My three challenges moving forward are:

  • Initializing the objects from a .rt scene file.
  • Adding different objects, like triangles, cubes and cylinders.
  • Handling lights with different colors.

The first two are pretty straight forward, but I’m out of my element on the third: There’s absolutely no light-handling on the one I did and the logic behind that isn’t very clear to me.

I’ll probably mess around with it for a while and try to add some basic lighting. If it takes to long I’ll hit the books.