Added Features

• distributed ray tracing
• anti-aliasing
• reflection/refraction blurring
• area lights (soft shadows)
• motion blur
• approximation to Poisson sampling

• minor features
• adaptive recursion
• noise bug in reflections solved
• pixel size

Comments

• The image
• the pixel size is set to 2 to allow perception of "jaggies" being antialiased.
• the mirror shows reflection blurring, the red ball shows motion blur, the blue ball emphasizes soft shadows, and the large checkered polygon emphasizes anti-aliasing.
• anti-aliasing is set to 9 rays per bundle with each sample in a range of tan(0.0015)
• the single area light consists of 25 samples with each sample in the range of tan(0.35). These are the default value for all lights.
• TIMESAMPLES has been set to 15 to blur the red sphere. The random time parameter is evidently not uniform, thus resulting in discrete spheres. A Poisson sampling should have been used as in the other ray bundles.

• The code
• Currently antialiasing is set to the same value for all objects as well as the eye. This causes reflection blurring to be set to a constant which is equal to the antialiasing of the eye. The correct angle between the distributed rays can be difficult to find for the checkerboard perspective problem.
• The noise bug in the reflections was due to round off error. When the collision of the ray and the nearest object was calculated any parametric value above 0 was considered an intersection. Unfortunately 0 was sometimes rounded to be just above 0 thus causing an intersection with itself. This was not happening in the shadow detection because objects are not checked against itself
• The user defined pixel size greatly improved the speed as well as the study of anti-aliasing effects.
• The adaptive recursion greatly speeded up rendering by only calculating reflecting or refracting rays when the color would have a defined level of impact.
• All bundles allow for user defined size of samples and number of samples which are n to the 2nd power where n is the number of rays in one row or column. (i.e. 1, 4, 9, 16, etc.)

Previous Features

• recursive ray tracing
• procedural checkerboard texture maps
• ambient, diffuse, and specular lighting
• fog
• Perspective viewpoint
• multiple point lights
• supports spheres, planes, and polygons of any number of vertices
• reflections
• transparency with the option of refraction
• Windows95 compatiable
• Windows code seperated to allow easy portability

Files

(set tab stop to 4 in order to view these files correctly)

• Ray.exe Ray.exeThe executable file.
• RayMath.hRayMath.cpp These files contain the Vector and Matrix classes
• RayGraphics.hRayGraphics.cpp These files contain the classes Light, Color, and Eye
• RayObjects.hRayObjects.cpp These files contain the all geometric objects used in Ray
• setup.hSetup.cpp These file contains various constants to be used in Ray. Some commonly used function prototypes are used in this file. Some externed variables are also included so all files can access them.
• World.cpp This file creates the lights and all objects along with their parameters.
• TraceRay.cpp contains code to determine the coloring of a specified pixel.
• rayView.cpp This is the main function which calls all other functions. The windows code is also within this file. The windows code has been seperated from the C++ Ray code as much as possible.
• ray.rc windows resources to be used for the windows graphical interface. Data includes Ray about (under help) as well as personalized bitmaps used for the cursor and other icons.
• miscellaneous windows files. Contact the arthor if you need these files in order to compile the project (Some of these files are large).

Previous version

Ray Version 1.1