Correct Reflections and Specular Lighting

Well, this is the first big milestone in the project. My ray tracer now actually renders something that looks believable, abstract, but believable. I corrected the bugs in the reflection ray calculations so reflections now show up on the correct side of the sphere. In addition, I added specular highlights as well. So now the spheres look like shiny balls that reflect their surroundings.

The algorithms are grossly inefficient. I don't really care at this point. :) I will have to go back in and refactor a lot of the code to fix the naive assumptions I made about ray tracing as I was just getting started. I only have one picture to post at this time. I am in the middle of upgrading my linux distribution from gentoo 2006.01 to the 2007.01 profile. This basically means I have to recompile every single library and executable on my machine. Since the dependant libs must be compiled first, sometimes apps stop working periodically. Apps like my ray tracer. *sigh*

I still need to add shadows. I couldn't get it to work before, but I think that fixing the reflections, will fix the shadows as well, since calculating the shadow rays, reflection rays and surface normals are very, very similar. I'll post more images when I can.



I decided to start using flickr for the renders I post. I added a few more renders, you can see them here.