The Beginnings of a Ray Tracer

Development of the ray tracer began a couple of days ago. Its design is similar to that of the ray tracer we wrote as a lab exercise on the course, and it borrows some pieces of code from it. Still, as far as my work effort is concerned, I am more or less rewriting it from scratch, making some diverging design decisions along the way.

For instance, there is no need for any kind of real-time interactivity, and thus such things will not be implemented in the first place (come to think of it, there is as of now a main loop, but that is going out the window very soon). However, the most notable actually new functionality in this very early stage is the .obj file parser. It allows me to render any scene exported from Blender, provided that all the faces have been triangulated.

Next up on my todo list is to conceptually swap some of the spatial axes around to match how they are in Blender, and then implement some lighting shaders. I should then be well on my way to start implementing the BSP algorithm.