Ray Tracing in 10 images

For the past two weeks at Recurse Center, I’ve been working on a project called Ray Tracing in One Weekend. In this post, I will show the progression of how I made mine.

Setting up the viewport to produce the initial scene:

Adding a sphere:

Adding a larger sphere to imitate earth:

Anti-aliasing:

Modeling Lambertian surface material:

Gamma correction:

Adding metal and glass materials:

Changing camera angle:

Lens blur:

Final Scene:

I started this project knowing little about computer graphics, planned to spend a week on it and move on. I ended up finding graphics much more interesting than I thought.

The code to produce the final scene took around 12 hours to run on my computer. At this point, I think I will pause explorations in graphics and learn more about computer architecture. I want to understand how to optimize the code to make future iterations faster.