Java

So far our reflections only work on surfaces made of materials that are perfectly smooth. In the real world not all surfaces are pefectly smooth yet are still reflective. So to simulat this for doing refletions we cast multiple rays out from the reflection point to caclulate the direction they are cast we take the normal of the surface at the hitpoint and purterb it using a random gaussian variable. The roughness/smoothness is the standard deviation of the gaussian distribution used for perturbing the normals. So the larger the standard deviation the rougher the surface appears.

This has been an incredibly annoying project. Granted it stems from the fact that I didn't have all the resources I needed as far as the minute detials behind programming the ray tracer.

Okay, really quick, photon mapping is where we cast photons from the light out into the scene we are drawing and store their interactions with the geometry in a photon map. Then we to a raytrace on the scene, but when we do our lighting calculations we use the information in the photon map as well as direct illumination. This gives us indirect illumination, and with the addition of a second photon map we can do good, cheap caustics. For more info check wikipedia.

So far all of our objects are dull and flat, we could easily make this more cool by adding in reflections. The technique is simple, we cast the ray from the eye, hit the object, and then cast another ray reflected off the object. This creates nice reflective objects, the first one only allows things to reflect once.