My Raytracer

The raytracer was a project I worked on with my friend, Luigi.  It took us quite a bit of time to get it up and running.  It's funny how some of the math seems obvious at first but then turns out to be fairly complex.

I have my original presentation page with the screenshots we thought were the most advanced.

Note that the raytracer outputs the pnm-format output on stdout.  You need to pipe it to pnmtopng (or cjpeg, etc.) to get an output file from it.  Here is an example:

  ./rt script_file_name | pnmtopng > output.png

We documented the progress and evolution of the raytracer through a number of screenshots.  We also tried to re-create the train image that our prof had supplied in class:

I believe there's still a bug in this raytracer where objects behind a light source will cast a shadow in front of it.  As far as I know, it's the only bug (besides its lack of support for textures and many primitives).

Download: raytracer.zip