Progress from initial rough output to final polished image: All of the output generated following the code from this tutorial: https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.html#surfacenormalsandmultipleobjects. Now I have a very high-level overview of what's involved in developing a ray tracer and I'm planning to improve and render different images.
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Background gradient
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Full scene
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Shading
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With ground
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Antialiasing
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Gray sphere
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Improved diffusion
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Lambertian diffusion
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Hollow glass
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Refracted
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Internal reflection
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Light reflection
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Final polished
- it's become so clear now that the syntax is not a problem. it found it very easy to understand what's going on in the
vec3.hfile because i know the foundational concept of object-oriented programming and interface. now i see why people say understanding one language well (in my case is Python) can help you grasp other programming languages fairly easily. - on a high level, a ray tracing consists of these core components:
- ray generation: the camera shoots rays to the pixels of an image. we need to define the position of the camera, where it's looking, and the virtual viewport
- ray-scene intersection: what the ray hits and where
- material/shading: what color it is, how rough, metallic, or transparent -> this is important because it defines how light scatters on the object surface
- light transport: when a ray hits a surface, it doesn't just stop — it spawns new rays. A mirror spawns a reflection ray. Glass spawns a refraction ray. A diffuse surface spawns rays in random directions to gather indirect light from the rest of the scene. This is recursive and is the core of what makes ray tracing look realistic. The number of times a ray is allowed to bounce is called the ray depth.
- image reconstruction: the radiance values collected by all the rays through a pixel need to be combined into a final pixel color by averaging multiple samples/pixel (antialising) -> tone mapping + gamma correction.