Chapter 9. Ray Tracing

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Chapter 9. Ray Tracing

Ray tracing is a technique for rendering three-dimensional graphics. It can render very complex geometry because it's a point-sampling method. It is very good at rendering pictures with curved surfaces, mirrors, and transparent surfaces. Simply put, ray tracing is just very good at calculating lighting interactions on a point level.

This chapter shows you how to implement ray tracing and how to write three ray-tracing applications. Each application simulates a specific natural lighting effect as seen in nature. Ray tracing is based on the simple idea of recording and displaying information about how light interacts and bounces off surfaces as it travels through an environment. Everything that you've been learning comes down to this chapter, where you put it all together. The ray-tracing algorithm will be applied to the cScene class. In the following chapters, you'll incorporate the photon-mapping algorithm.

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