LiAR isn’t a raytracer

While debugging another segmentation fault on linux, I was trying to run LiAR in gdb (actually KDbg). The program crashed somewhere in an allocator, but the reason why was almost impossible to see. The debugging experience was crippled because distutils compiles with full optimization -O3 by default, at least my linux box.
If I [...]

When I tried to run a first render in linux, I got a segmentation fault in the photon mapper because there were no lights. Of course, this shouldn’t cause a crash (fixed by now), but why were there no lights? I was pretty sure I defined one, and a quick investigation of the [...]

The description of LiAR says: “‘LiAR isn’t a raytracer’ is an open source, cross platform, object-oriented and extendable ray tracer written in C++ and Python by Bram de Greve”. However, that’s not entirely true since currently, LiAR only runs on the Windows platform. It’s time to live up to the promise. To [...]

I’ve added clip mapping (*) to LiAR, which is some sort of alpha channel for surfaces. It can be used to create holes in a surface using a texture. The texture is compared to a threshold to determine where the surface should be removed, so that rays can travel undisturbed through the removed parts.
This [...]

I’m trying to use the subdivision surfaces I’ve implemented to get a smoother surface for car i’m rendering for PHD Motorsports. The original model has UV coordinates that need to be interpolated as well. As each triangle is split in four, each edge is split two. I’ve been using the naive assumption [...]