Mini ray tracer - comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing

Message from discussion Mini ray tracer
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Message-ID: <427de4a3$0$39077$ed2e19e4@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net>
From: Jon Harrop <use...@jdh30.plus.com>
Subject: Mini ray tracer
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing
Date: Sun, 08 May 2005 02:27:06 +0100
Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
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I recently tried my hand at writing a ray tracer (something I haven't done
for 15 years!) and, in particular, I to write the shortest possible ray
tracer which was still comprehensible and interesting. The initial result
was a 222-line OCaml program which incrementally renders a sphere-flake via
OpenGL:

  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/index.html

I then cut this program down to a 66-line OCaml program and ported it into a
97-line C++ program. These programs are compared on this page:

  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/comparison.html

The cut-down versions don't do reflections, color or such a pretty
sphere-flake and output a greyscale PGM but they do still use hierarchical
spherical bounding volumes to accelerate rendering enough that they can
render scenes containing millions of spheres.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com