In the last entry some simple rendering techniques aimed at improving the speed and quality of the renders were presented. In this short entry the ray tracer will be extended in two rather major ways:

• it will be able to render arbitrary triangle meshes rather than just spheres ("analytical" sphere r…

Beware: this entry is HUGE, lots of stuff covered and it will likely take time for the reader to digest it all.

A version of the rendering equation was introduced in the last entry. As we saw, the integral inside the rendering equation generally has no direct, analytical solution, so there are only …

Please forgive the delay between the previous entry and this one. I didn't mention this before, but I'll try to post these at intervals of two weeks to a month or so; I had already prewritten the first two so they were posted in relatively quick succession, this was exceptional so don't expect week…

In the last entry we set up a simple ray tracer capable of rendering two spheres into an image with solid colors, without any kind of lighting. For this entry we will extend our ray tracer a little bit:

• handle arbitrarily many spheres instead of just hardcoding two of them
  
• better color representation…

So about a year ago I posted about writing a ray tracing article series. Unfortunately I did not actually have the time to begin working on it last year, and since then it has been gnawing at me, because it's something that I wanted to do and (apparently) people were also looking forward to it. But…