Wrote a ray tracer (and rendered an animation with it)

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nikki
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Wrote a ray tracer (and rendered an animation with it)

Post by nikki »

Hey all! Been a while.

So I was working on a ray tracer for a class at my university. It's got reflections/refractions and stuff. Was fun. I wrote a Blender exporter and rendered a little animation with it. Check it out!
[youtube]lok6P1w5BWQ[/youtube]

Ray tracing is fun, and actually really straightforward to do seemingly-complex effects with. Can't wait for the time when personal computers can do it real-time. We're getting there (check out Brigade, which does path tracing).
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Re: Wrote a ray tracer (and rendered an animation with it)

Post by betajaen »

Hey Nikki! How you doing?
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Re: Wrote a ray tracer (and rendered an animation with it)

Post by nikki »

'Sup betajaen. Doing pretty well, college is fun. Haven't worked on Ogre-related things in a while, but have definitely been doing something interesting all the time -- some systems/OS stuff, some algorithms/theory stuff, some math, etc.
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Re: Wrote a ray tracer (and rendered an animation with it)

Post by Kojack »

Ray tracers are damn fun.
A lot of stuff is so much easier, such as shadows.

I did a raytracer for university too. It had no animation support, but it did feature lightwave mesh rendering, 192 bit colour (double precision rgb hdr), panorama rendering, side by side and anaglyph red/blue stereo rendering, and plugin dll procedural textures (only one actually created, a perlin turbulence plugin that we used quite heavily).
(I didn't actually do any math or graphics programming subjects at that university, I chose it as a 6 month final project. I got the basic ray vs sphere, ray vs plane, ray reflection and ray refraction formulas from an issue of Dr Dobbs, the lightwave loader and perlin turbulence code from the net, then made the rest up myself. I had a teammate, he did the user interface, I did the rendering backend)
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Re: Wrote a ray tracer (and rendered an animation with it)

Post by betajaen »

Agreed. The basics of it is quite straightforward, so you can get something going before you learn all the particulars.

Here is something maddening - this is WebGL using a live GLSL ray-tracer.

http://glsl.heroku.com/e#1761.2
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