Experiments with raytracing
Raytracing is a method of producing realistic looking
images by reverse tracing a ray from the eye through
the ``window'' and into the scene. If it strikes an
object, the lighting can then be determined by tracing
back to the light sources, or the reflection or refraction
can be determined by tracing a new ray in the proper
direction.
I have played with two ray tracing programs.
Rayshade
My first venture into raytracing was a simple desk,
chairs, and lamp built in rayshade. Soon I stumbled upon
a definition for a human shape and created a reasonable
office scene (even if it is upside-down).
While playing with rayshade, I created a font of
reuseable upper case letters built from cylinders,
torii, and spheres. After distributing this to
other users of rayshade, matching characters for
the lower case letters and special symbols were
quickly created and distributed. A good example
use of this font can be seen in this
circular arrangement of my name.
Now the font is being used in the official
User's Guide on the WWW
POV-Ray
The Persistence of Vision Raytracer seems to be more
oriented towards the professional image creater than
the hacker. It has techniques for making an image
very believable even though they may not be based
on mathematics. It's definition language also
seems to be geared towards more ambitious projects
than RayShade.
There is also an animation
tool that outputs scenes for POV-Ray.
Other raytracers
A very realistic raytracer with a more sophisticated
form of modeling light reflections is called
radiance.
