Some months ago, I’ve decided to dig into raytracing, and more exactly interactive raytracing. So I’ve started writting my own library, based on several publications.
nVidia announced recently its own framework, Intel wants also to do raytracing on Larrabee, it is the current trend.
First, raytracing is a tool to draw a picture from a scene. It’s like a camera observing the scene, and to know the content of each pixel on the film, a ray is cast through the scene. Depending on the objects, rays will propagate to other objects or lights, and then the actual color of the camera pixel can then be computed.
A raytracer is in fact really easy to write. The math formulae are simple for a version that will return satisfactory results. On the contrary, an interactive or “real-time” one is more complicated. This is why I started my small project and why I will blog from time to time about it.
Interactive or real-time means that the drawing must be fast, really fast. This also means that realistic drawing is out of the question. I’ve started with a simple raytracer, with some optimizations, and then I’ve added some algorithmic optimizations. I will talk about all this in several posts.
How does a raytracer actually work?
In physical vision, light rays travel around the world from the sources, hitting objects, then reflected or transmitted and finally arriving at the eye (or camera). The principle of raytracing is to do it backwards, from the camera to the light sources. The camera film, or the retina, is symbolized by a screen.
In this case, the emitted ray hits object 1 with some angle to the normal (the normal vector is the vector orthogonal to the tangent plane of the object). Object 1 gets some light and so the color ray depends on this light, the object and the angle between the normal and the direction of the light.
The ray is then reflected to object 2 and hits it with another angle. As for object 2, it gets some light and the reflected ray carries a specific color. This color is then blended with the color of the primary ray, and this final color is the color of the pixel on the screen.
Coming next
I’ve written my library in C++, tested it with several compilers on different platforms. So as to test the code, to profile it and to create a scene in an elegant manner, I’ve added a small Python wrapper. This will be the subject of my next post.
Then, I’ll go through secondary and shadow rays, a GUI for the raytracer, acceleration structures, …
The code is released under the LGPL on Launchpad.
Additional links
Interactive Raytracer on Intel website