Prozak

Look into mod-rewrite.

 

mod-rewrite allows you to redirect the content into the same php handler, index.php for example, and you pass it the URL.

 

This is the basis for the MVC model.

Hopefully this link will get you started fast:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/a-deeper-look-at-mod_rewrite-for-apache/

 

Good luck!

Bacterius: Ah, solved it! Also added matrix operations, and a rotation procedure, and was able to tilt the sphere by 30º, and saw that the texturing was all correct. No mirroring at the poles.

Can I bother you with a few questions?

1) Regarding colors, as I trace a ray through the scene, through reflections, textures, etc, for each step of the way how do I handle the computation of the final color?

I'm, for now, going with:

rgb_final = (rgb1 + rgb2) /2;
...basically averaging colors for each ray collision...

I've heard something about color multiplication, like so:
rgb_final = rgb1 * rgb2;

2) If I hit a reflective surface, should I follow the surface's Normal vector, or should I calculate the reflection as below?
R = 2(AP . N) x N - N

AP - Vector from view to Intersected Point, normalized
N - Normal Vector of the surface, normalized

3) Any online resources you advise?

Thank you!

Bacterius, thank you for your continued interest. I'll write a reply later when I get home with the code I'm using. Again, thank you.

Bacterius: Thanks for your reply. Offsetting my U coordinates allows me to rotate the sphere along the equator. The same does not work with the V register, as it puts the south pole along the equator, stretching it. My current textures are classic earth, moon, mars textures.

I have a screen shot here: http://www.positronicdreams.com/stuff/fup/_fileup/raytracing001.png

Everything seems perfect in that image, but it isn't. I can mess with the U coordinate, but I can't rotate the sphere or anything. In the link I provide as source, it seems that the equations take a north vector, a right vector, and a 3rd vector (cross-product of the first 2), so this would give us 3 axis to manipulate the sphere, but alas, whenever I mess with those, the resulting image has flaws, most common is texture mirroring along some axis on the sphere...

Ashaman73: Thanks for replying. I'm really set on doing classic texture mapping, onto a sphere. All I want is a good pointer where I can read up on this and get it right, or at least copy some code. I really don't want to do cube mapping at this time.

The closes I seem to find is this article:
http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Raytracing_Topics_Techniques-Part_6_Textures_Cameras_and_Speed.shtml

...but the code isn't very well kept, and the discription of the algorithm contradicts the code in places.

Any tips?