Raytracing Overview

This document will eventually cover the concepts involved in raytracing.

I have been working on a raytracer for several months. This has been an extremely fun program to work on. I've learned quite a lot about lighting models and fractal geometry by this effort. I hope I can inspire you to jump into the world of scene generation and start your own raytracer or radiosity program. Please post what you learn! I hope to start a radiosity/raytracer hybrid someday soon.

The following is a list of capabilities implemented in my raytracer:

• Scene Graph with automatic bounding cube generation
• Ambient, diffuse & specular light modeling
• Accurate refractive model
• Bilinear texture sampling
• Bump mapping
• Computed & interpolated normal generation
• Anti-aliasing through stochastic multi-pass ray generation
• Projected textures

Click on the following thumbnails to see images created by my raytracer:

The following is the bumpmap image used to create the water in the lake scene (only the water is of interest, the mountain & moon background were from two textured triangles).