Posts with tag " Raytracing"

It's going to take me considerably longer than one weekend to build out a ray tracer...

Last time, I laid the groundwork to construct a PPM image and output a simple gradient image, like the one below.

This time around, I'm going to focus on building some useful abstractions that will make work going forward easier. This is going to focus on two areas:

• A Vector3 class, which will be helpful for representing 3D points, directional vector, RGB colors and offsets. We'll implement some useful operators and geometric methods in addition.
• A Bitmap class, which will represent our output raster and handle the details of saving that raster out as a PPM image file.

Whew, it's been a while...

A few weeks ago, I happened across a new book by Peter Shirley, Ray Tracing in One Weekend. Longer ago than I like to remember, I took a computer graphics course in college, and the bulk of our project work revolved around writing a simple ray tracer in Java. It was one of the few really code-heavy CS courses I took, and I really enjoyed it; from time to time I keep pulling down that old project and port it over to whatever new language I'm trying to learn. One of the primary textbooks for that course was Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, aka "the tiger book," of which Mr. Shirley was also an author. Since that's one of the more accessible graphics textbooks I've encountered, I figured this new offering was worth a look. It didn't disappoint.

Ray Tracing in One Weekend is, true to its title, a quick read, but it packs a punch in its just under 50 pages. Even better, it's running at around $3 (or free if you have Kindle Unlimited). I paged through it in a couple of hours, then, as I often do, set about working through the code.

If you want to follow along, I've put my code up on Github, although it's still a work in progress; we're wrapping up a new release at the day job and so I've not had a huge amount of time to work on anything extra. Fortunately, each example I'll be doing here is pretty self-contained, and so all of the code will be up here. We'll start at the beginning, with a simple Hello World a la raytracing.