My raytracer

More raytracer stuff on my CS788 pages: I finally got around to starting my ray tracer. I get the feeling this project won't be finished anytime soon...

I decided to try out lighting models first. This is probably a bad idea, since I haven't yet bothered with simple things like more primitives and already my renders are taking forever. I have simple path tracing working, and am mostly convinced that it is correct. I'm still playing with different sampling schemes, and once I'm familiar enough I'll try out some bidirectional heuristics. Eventually I'd like to try Metropolis, but that's going to take a while.

All output files here have been created for a display gamma of 2.2, although I haven't set the proper PNG header for this (and sRGB space) on all of the files.

Thu Dec 6 16:45:29 EST 2001
Playing with different randomized techniques for lighting. Right now I'm playing with spherical area lights, randomly sampling the surface.

Of course, there were many bad mistakes and lots of small renders that took forever on the road to making this not suck.

That said, it still sucks.

Wed Dec 5 11:46:23 EST 2001
First round of coding was extremely fruitful, thanks to the help from both James and Adam. James especially, since he just wrote a ray tracer for Graphics class this term.

Got simple reflections working, adaptive supersampling, spheres and planes, and used cheezy phong shading.