Raytracer

One of the projects in my computer graphics class was to create an offline ray tracer from scratch in C++.

Technical Details

This was a difficult yet immensely rewarding project. It was difficult in that I started from scratch and had to learn how light behaves in the real world in order to simulate it accurately. One skillset among many you quickly sharpen in computer graphics is math, specifically with regards to linear algebra and vectors. After finally cracking the code of putting math and physics into code to simulate light the results were very satisfying.

Problems

A problem I ran into a lot with the project was having to overhaul big sections of code whenever I needed to add a new feature (shadow rays, triangle intersections, reflection, etc). From this I learned that I need to spend more time planning out the program, so that I don’t need to refactor large blocks of code repeatedly.