Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 3

Bare-Bones Ray Tracing

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

• understand how ray casting works;
• know how rays are defined;
• know how to intersect a ray with a plane and a sphere;
• understand the structure of a simple ray tracer;
• have implemented a ray tracer that can render orthographic views of an arbitrary number of planes and spheres.

The purpose of this chapter is to explain how a number of ray-tracing processes work in a simplified context. I’ll discuss here how ray tracing generates images, how rays are defined, how ray-object intersections work, the classes required for a simple ray tracer, and how to ray trace an ...