LiAR isn't a raytracer

On Mercury’s request, I’ve been playing with ray differentials and texture filtering this week. Ray differentials are essentially derivatives of the viewing ray with respect to the image plane. They give us an estimation of how much of the surface being hit is covered by one pixel on the image plane, the ray’s “footprint”. This […]

I’ve added reflection and refraction to the Simple shader. It was pretty easy, just implementing what i’ve written down in my article Reflections & Refractions in Raytracing. In this implementation, the refraction index is a property of the shader though and it is given as n2 / n1. To implement reflections and refraction, there’s also […]

When the shader is called, it of course need to know what light is reaching its surface. Initially, the shader would call each light for samples and check wether they are obstructed or not. Also, when combined with photonmapping, the shader would have to query the photonmap. All this was a bit too much logic […]

I decided to create a blog to write down my experiences while developing LiAR. It’s mostly going to be about how features are developed, but also about design decisions etc. Not much more to say right now … so share and enjoy! :)