Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk Programming

Chapter 28. Ray Tracing

Mark Jason Dominus

In this article, we’ll look at one of the most flexible and versatile methods of rendering three-dimensional images with a computer: ray tracing. Suppose you have a model of a three-dimensional space, with some three-dimensional objects in it, and some light sources. Somewhere in that space is an observer, whom we’ll call “you,” and we’d like to render your view of the space and the objects in it. Ray tracing is a way to do it. This is serious stuff, used to render all kinds of computer graphics, including special effects in the movies Terminator II and Toy Story.

In order for an object to be visible to you, a ray of light must leave one of the light sources, bounce off the object, and reach your eye without bumping into anything opaque along the way. The idea behind ray tracing is simple: you can’t see any light that doesn’t enter your eye, so we can ignore all the other light. To understand what you see, all we need to do is follow the path of the light rays backwards from your eye and see if they eventually intersect a light source, perhaps after bouncing off of some objects along the way. If so, we render the objects appropriately. We’ll see what “appropriately” means later on.

The important thing to notice here is all the zillions of light rays that we never had to consider at all. All sorts of light is bouncing around our space, and we ignored most of it, because we only followed the rays that came back to your eye.

I’ve written a small ...