Ray Tracing Project

This project is a ray-tracing engine designed to render 3D scenes with realistic lighting, shading, and reflections. It supports various geometric objects, recursive ray tracing, and customizable material properties.

Features

• Objects:
  • Spheres
  • Triangles
  • General Quadric Surfaces
  • Floor with alternating tile colors
• Lighting:
  • Ambient, diffuse, and specular lighting
  • Multiple light sources
• Materials:
  • Configurable reflection coefficients (ambient, diffuse, specular, recursive)
  • Adjustable shininess for specular highlights
• Camera:
  • Configurable camera positions and orientations
• Rendering:
  • Recursive ray tracing for reflections
  • Adjustable recursion depth
  • Pixel-based rendering with configurable resolution

File Descriptions

scene.txt

Defines the scene to be rendered, including:

• Number of objects and light sources
• Object properties (position, size, color, material coefficients)
• Light source properties (position, color)
• Camera configuration and rendering parameters

objects.h

Contains the implementation of:

• Geometric objects (spheres, triangles, quadric surfaces, floor)
• Lighting and shading calculations
• Ray-object intersection logic
• Recursive ray tracing algorithm

geometry.h

Provides geometric utilities for vector and point operations, such as:

• Dot and cross products
• Distance calculations
• Plane and line equations

How to Run

1. Define the scene in scene.txt.
2. Compile the project using a g++ -O2 main.cpp -lglut -lGL -lGLU
3. Run the executable to render the scene.

Acknowledgments

This project is part of a ray-tracing assignment and uses OpenGL for rendering. Additionally, the project makes use of the bitmap_image library for image generation and output.