As I am studying Media Technology we always have to do some practical things.
For example record a song or create and build a booth for a trade fair (visit duesscover.de for our last booth at boot Duesseldorf 2011 about one year ago). This time we had to program a raytracer from scratch in c++ to get to know how it works.
We build this with a group of four. I did most of the programming while the others were doing the math and research stuff. Mine is by far not the best one in this Semester – one guy build a whole GUI with import, export and multi threading – but as this was the first „big“ program I’ve coded so far I’m pretty happy with the result.
I have included:
- Adjustable recursion depth
- 4x antialiasing via Oversampling
- Adjustable bleary reflections
- Refractions (Transparency)
- Adjustable soft shadows
It was a nice challenge to create it. Especially because you can see almost everything (and every mistake) you do directly just by rendering a picture. Maybe someone who is interested in learning and understanding how a raytracer works (or how to build one) can have a look at it.
You can download the compiled .exe or the whole visual c++ project below. Have fun with it.