Specula

This ray tracer implements the basis of a ray tracing rendering engine in C++. It is possible to render still images, or sequences of images. Multi threading has also been implemented allowing for significantly faster render times.

The ability to create multiple object of sphere, triangle, plane, circle, or mesh types is currently available. Where a mesh is any collection of triangles specified by an .stl file. Thus allowing for the import of any arbitrary model. Using these five different supported objects, there is the possibility for the construction of all three dimensional models.

The implementation of different materials is such that the reflectively of the material, the specular index, and the diffuse and specular colors can be determined. Using these settings it is possible to demonstrate most opaque materials.

There are three formats of lights implemented in the system. Distant lights are lights that cast parallel rays across the entire space. They are useful for simulations of sunlight, or large sources of light that are very far away. Point lights approximate point sources. Area lights represent a light source from a rectangle. This is useful for most light sources, as very few sources of light are actual point sources, and can be better represented by this area light source. Every light can have have a specified intensity and color. And area light sources can specify the number of samples for calculating the lighting. Higher number of samples improves the quality of soft shadows produced in the final image.

The entire process is self enclosed, as the process of compilation also compiles and links libpng in order to output png files.

The multi threading is optimized by scattering the pixels that each thread renders, so that no single thread is solely rendering a simple set of pixels. This proves a significantly faster rendering time. Thus allowing for the rendering of significantly more complex systems.