Raytracing Anyone?

There’s not much cooler than Raytracing. Making photoeralistic (or a little too perfect-istic) images on you computer is definitely cool.

A bagillion years ago, I dove into raytracing and made my own. It was AP Calculus in high school when I realized that gradients lead to surface normals. Shocker!

Anyway, I dug out the old codebase and dusted it off (turns out Turbo C++ is a little different from gcc 10). Substituted OpenCV for BGI and BAM, Raytracer Resurrection.

Still got it.

Let the images speak for themselves:

I can VIVIDLY remember the night I got it working. To see the shaded ellipsoidal surface that took several minutes to draw was a pretty cool feeling. Yeah, it was an ellipsoid (technically a prolate ellipsoid), not a sphere.

Here’s the refracted version:

Recursive reflection kind of falls out naturally