Assignment #3

Assignment #3 - basic ray tracer. Features:

• Diffuse lighting
• Ambient lighting
• Specular highlights
• Shadows
• Reflections
• Simple anitialiasing
• High dynamic range color
• Geometric objects: spheres, planes, triangles
• Perspective is maintained regardless of requested window size - pixels remain "square"

How to build and run:
Platform: Mac OS X 10.5.6, XCode 3.0 / gcc 4.0.1

tar jxf jbowles-assign3.tar.bz2
cd jbowles-assign3
make
./raytracer --width=512 --height=512 --reflections \
  --shadows --samples=3

Usage: ./raytracer [options]

options:
  --width                   Window width
  --height                  Window height
  --reflections             turn on reflections
  --maxdepth                maximum number of reflections
                            (default 3)
  --shadows                 turn on shadows
  --samples                 square root of the number of
                            samples per pixel.
  --perf                    turn on performance measurement
                            rendering

To exit, pressing Apple-Q, escape, or just q.

Output generated on a MacBook Pro 17" 2.4GHz dual core. Size of each image is 512x512.

./raytracer --width=512 --height=512
1.114634 seconds to render
Number of rays: 262144

./raytracer --width=512 --height=512 --shadows
1.161857 seconds to render
Number of rays: 446464

./raytracer --width=512 --height=512 --shadows --reflections
1.270463 seconds to render
Number of rays: 693328

./raytracer --width=512 --height=512 --shadows \
  --reflections --samples=5
32.375095 seconds to render
Number of rays: 17334027