helmetroo / raytracer-2013

A raytracer in C that renders a simple scene with floor, snowman and box under simple lighting

raytracer-2013

What is it?

This was for a college assignment in my undergrad graphics course. The goal was to write a raytracer in C that could render a simple scene with some objects. The code dates from April 2013. It uses legacy OpenGL to draw the rendered scene to a viewport.

Build

This was developed on OSX and Linux, and can only be run on those OSes (because of the OpenGL headers).

make

Running

When you have built the program, run it with the parameters (see below).

./raytrace eyeX eyeY eyeZ atX atY atZ recDepth

You should be able to see a scene with a checkerboard floor, snowman, with a light illuminating the scene.

Parameters

Parameter	Description
eyeX	The X position of the camera.
eyeY	The Y position of the camera.
eyeZ	The Z position of the camera.
atX	The X coordinate specifying the direction the camera is looking at.
atY	The Y coordinate specifying the direction the camera is looking at.
atZ	The Z coordinate specifying the direction the camera is looking at.
recDepth	The recursion depth for reflective objects in the scene.

Issues

Reflection with a high number of recursion levels tends to have black dots appear at reflections. I wasn’t exactly sure why this was happening. I tried adding blocks to prevent burned out whites, but this did nothing. This doesn’t occur if the max recursion level is 0.