Ray Tracer

By Maggie Duffy

Project Description

My final project for CPE 471 was to create a ray tracer. I started with a basic parser that reads in pov files and looks for a camera, light source, spheres, and planes. Then rays are cast from the camera onto the scene. If a ray hits an object(a sphere or plane) then another ray is cast over the normal line and tests to see what object it hits. If the second ray hits an object, it returns that color to the original hit point and is used when deciding what color to set that pixel to for the user.

Final Picture

I wrote my ray tracer so it would depict a festive christmas ornament scene on some snow!

Project Implementation

I looked at many tutorials while working on this project. Different ones were helpful at different times:

• a chapter written by Professor P. Shirley was useful for the overall idea of what was supposed to happen and for pictures


• ScratchAPixel was really useful for the math of when you hit an object


• This is a page from another 471 student that was really helpful in figuring out the shading for the project