OK, this is it: The 7th installment of the ray tracing tutorial series. Over the last few weeks I worked very hard to improve the speed of the ray tracer, and I am quite proud of the results: Render times for the scene in article 4 (you know, the sphere Read more »

Welcome to the sixth installment of my ray tracing column. This time I would like to fix some things that I left out earlier: Texturing and a camera. Before I proceed I would first like to correct an error in the previous article. Some readers (Bramz, Thomas de Bodt) pointed Read more »

It's time to do something useful with the new speed that the regular grid brought us. Ray tracing speed is just like money: You always spend twice the amount you actually have. :) One of the finest things to spend it on is soft shadows. They are reasonably easy to Read more »

The last scene from the previous article (the one with the sphere grid to show off the new refraction code) took almost 9 seconds to render on my pimpy 1.7Ghz Toshiba laptop with 1600x1200 screen (I know resolution has nothing to do with it, but I thought I would mention Read more »

When you are deep in a raytracer project, you start looking at nature in an odd manner. I've noticed the same when working on a polygon engine: Building interiors suddenly appeared to have lots of 'polygonal detail' and 'wonderfully subdivided splines', but also 'poo... Read more »

Hello and welcome to a new series of articles (or column, if you wish) on the topic of raytracing. For those that do not know me: My name is Jacco Bikker, also known as 'Phantom'. I work as '3D tech guy' at Overloaded, a company that develops and distributes games Read more »