A real time ray tracer :)

[Paulius]

I somehow got the idea to make a real time ray tracer, and it turns out it?¢_Ts one of the most fun things to write, you implement everything yourself and there?¢_Ts actually very little code. Right now it doe's Phong shading, shadows, reflections and sphere and plane primitives. Planning to (eventually) add texturing, more primitives, normal displacement and CSG.


Move about with FPS'ish controls, press L to see how adaptive sampling acts. You'll need a lot of CPU power.
http://legion.gibbering.net/paulius/RaytraceV01.zip

[Traveler]

Wow that is so cool!! :shock:

There's something strange with the fps though, cause when I pressed L for the adaptive sampling, things movent noticebly more slower. The fps however stayed the same. (32~35).

Looking forward to see more of this!

[Paulius]

There's something strange with the fps though, cause when I pressed L for the adaptive sampling, things movent noticebly more slower. The fps however stayed the same. (32~35).

I was predicting fps only from time taken by sampling, not including the actual rendering. The slowdown is strange, cause after pressing L the only thing that changes is that quads between sampled point's don't get filled, which theoretically could only improve performance :scratch:

[Goliatus]

There are many skillful programmers on Litwa

[Paulius]

Texture mapping done, with a big slowdown though.

http://legion.gibbering.net/paulius/RaytraceV02.zip
Some new controls to play around with:
R - toggle reflections
1,2,3 - adjust maximum subdivision count

About the slowdown Traveler described, it seam's non existent on nVidia card's, small on intel's, and horrible on ATI's, at least on those I tried. Anyone knows how come OpenGl's GL_LINE glPolygonMode give's these strange results on different cards.

[WILL]

Very nice.

Mind you it toggles between 2 and 3 FPS when I set it to 3 polyphony and turn on reflection.

It goes blank when I turn on the L function. But to explain all of this read my system specs below.

My NEC VERSA SXi:
CPU = Intel Pentium III 800 MHz
Memory = 512 MB SDRAM PC133 or 166, not sure
Video Card = "ATI RAGE MOBILITY-M1 AGP" 8MB of video ram(extended via AGP to 32)
OS = Windows XP Professional

[Alimonster]

This is a very cool thing indeed. There's something unusually satisfying moving around a scene and have it accurately reflected in the objects, especially moving up close to a sphere.

I've not tried the texture mapped version yet, just the first one, but the speed on the first one was fine.

As for the speed hit on wireframe mode -- well, I've heard that some graphics cards emulate wireframe mode by making the lines out of small polygons, but FWIW I noticed no major speed decrease in wireframe mode with my ATI card. I'll try the later version and will let you know if that's still the case.

[Momor]

Hmm I loooove these kind of topics !

That's a very impressive stuff. Do you plan, by chance, to release the source code ?

Now for my comprehension : how is OpenGL handy for such kind of thing ? As far as I know, a raytracer does not render using polygons, so a basic plain DirectDraw or GDI surface with a good SetPixel() function should be enough.

Perhaps are you using OpenGL to speed-up the final blitting to the screen ?

[Paulius]

Do you plan, by chance, to release the source code ?

Sure thing, I'll release the source code when it'll be more complete and some cleaning up is in order.

how is OpenGL handy for such kind of thing ?

Classical, cheatless ray tracing, where ray's are traced for every pixel, is very slow and hardly doable in realtime. I cheat a lot here :twisted: . I exploit the fact that the color of an object doesn't change much in nearby pixels, trace fewer rays, if they didn?¢_Tt hit the same object then trace more ray's, otherwise I interpolate between them, and by using OpenGL I get almost free quad interpolation done by hardware, not to mention bilinear filtering and other cool stuff, and also a possibility to do polygonal rendering on top of it. Of course because of this some limitations are introduced and there are sampling artifact (like poor specular highlights on spheres from a far, and missing very small objects), but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

[Paulius]

I felt a little ashamed of not doing anything for a long time, trying to figure out some math somehow became really depressing, so at least I'll release the source code. http://legion.gibbering.net/paulius/Raytracev03.zip Not much new except infinite cylinders, and now 9 and 0 control field of view.