John's RayTracer homepage
The story of RTK:
RTK is a raytracer that I work on occasionally. it started
out as a contest with a friend of mine from caltech
Walter Brisken.
At the house i live at we have a common meeting area referred
to as "Lower Crotch" and we also have these
events called Crotch-a-thons
where we see how long we can stay there without leaving. in any case a
couple of summers ago we had one of these crotch-a-thons and Walter
and I decided to up the stakes by having a programming contest to see who
could write the best raytracer in the two day period. Well it ended up
that his was much more functional having more primitives and whatnot due
to his more advanced math and physics background , but mine was over twice
as fast. so we declared it a draw and here is half the results. for Walter's
half you can check his homepage via the link above.
Features:
- CSG via a generalized concept that can do unions
and intersections (originally Walter's idea.)
- plane and sphere primitives
- very fast
- specular,ambient,diffuse,reflection,whatnot
- many light sources
- right handed coordinate system
- and the best part. small easily modifiable code. easy to fool around
and muck around with
okay.. so its not that great as raytracers go.. but its fast! and the code
is all there to look at or modify. All the graphics on this page were rendered
in it.. here's a little mpeg animation to look
at too.
get the source tarball here: rtk001.tar.gz
back to my computer stuff.
back to my homepage.