Pixels on a canvas

Tuesday, 2019-12-03 in devlog about #devember, #devember2019, #hourofcode, #swift, #raytracing

Pretty much the whole point of a ray tracer such as this one is to render pretty pictures, and for that we’re going to need a canvas to render onto.

typedef Pixel = simd_float4

struct Canvas { let width: Int; let height: Int }

Pixels can be set on the canvas, and it can be inspected to see what’s already there. When the rendering is complete the canvas can be exported for display or file output.

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Actual pixels

Wednesday, 2019-12-04 in devlog about #devember, #devember2019, #hourofcode, #swift, #raytracing

First actual image generated, using a “camera light”. The shading is too dark, for some reason I can’t figure out at the moment, so I guess tomorrow will be more of a debugging session than new feature creation.

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Surface normals

Monday, 2019-12-02 in devlog about #devember, #devember2019, #hourofcode, #swift, #raytracing

Today brings normal vectors into the mix, a critical component for shading computations; the normal vector of a surface at the point where it was hit by a ray, to be precise. Because the normal depends on the hit position on the surface, and we’ll need that too, we keep that around as well.

Intersecting spheres

Sunday, 2019-12-01 in devlog about #devember, #devember2019, #hourofcode, #swift, #raytracing

The first piece of actual ray tracing: calculating the intersection between a ray and a sphere. To find the intersections, we need to solve the quadratic equation of the sphere being equal to the linear equation of the ray. The interpretation of imaginary roots is that the ray does not intersect the sphere.

Basic data types

Sunday, 2019-12-01 in devlog about #devember, #devember2019, #hourofcode, #swift

Alright, the first push to the [github repo] is complete. Starting out small with just the basic data types that will be at the core of everything, and some tolerance equality operators for comparisons.