PureBasic Forums - English

BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy)

An acceleration structure allows to skip the vast majority of intersection tests. For large numbers of primitives this results in dramatic speedups.
While there are many types of acceleration structures, and other options for BVHs, too, a BVH with Axis Aligned ...

With that change, while not perfect, to me it feels closer to what a big asteroid/moon should look like.
But that might be a matter of taste.

Doing procedural textures and geometry is probably the thing I like most apart from ray tracing. And I really like what you have done here.
Even up close the asteroids look very good.
I also like how you're experimenting with different noise functions, although when looking at the 'F1' asteroid I ...

The triangle intersection method I've chose here is relative easy to understand and very flexible.
It's main downside is, it suffers from high rounding errors, which can result in jagged edges. Switching to doubles can fix that, but I plan to show a different method without that drawback in the ...

Thanks guys!

@pf shadoko

I'd like to implement a material system (and maybe a camera) before going any further down the quality/realism road. It's already quite messy as it is.
But that stuff will make the code much more complex, so my thought was to take a step back, and do tutorials about ...

Refraction.

I am rather unhappy with this one as it looks crappy and I can't really explain the math.
Making it look better would require much more code for scene and material setup, and probably make it more confusing.
So I just post it as is, for now, to get it out of the way.

ScreenWidth = 600 ...

Thanks for the nice words and for the 'transformation'.

Stuff like that can improve readability or confuse the heck out of people. And I have a hard time judging that, as I know what I'm coding (well, most of the time anyways).
So for now I will stick to the simple implementation.

pf shadoko, thanks for the reply.
I love using macros, pointers, assembly... but I simply can't tell what makes stuff simpler or more confusing for the regular PB user.
Have you looked at the short lived 'experiments in ray tracing' series I've done here?
I thought I've kept that simple at the time ...

And now reflections.

The lack of specular highlight and ambient light are rather obvious, but the usual way to do this for simple ray tracers are actually cheats and doing the real deal would probably to much for this tutorial series.
I'll hopefully squeeze in a part with a bunch of those cheats ...

Thanks for the nice words guys! :D

@kurzer: I've started ray tracing on the Amiga in the 80's too, but was more interested in coding one, as I lack any artistic skills.

@pf shadoko: That's me on a good day, you should see a current picture. :wink:

@DK_Peter: I thought about that, but I didn't ...

I am really happy you guys like it so far, because I was rather unsure about it.
I've taken a day off today, as I'm not feeling to well, so nothing for tomorrow.

With light we need shadow too...

(I am trying to keep the comments in the code down, to not wear you down with walls of text stating the obvious, but figuring out what is obvious and what just seems that way to me, because I am doing this for so long, is close to impossible for me. So, if there are ...

The result from the first code looked more like a filled circle than a sphere, and we actually shouldn't have been able to see it, because there was no light. Let's change that!

ScreenWidth = 600 : ScreenHeight = 400

; Because we will use vectors and coordinates more and more, lets create a ...

Hi Guys,

I've played with the idea of posting a tutorial for ray tracing for many years now, but wasn't quite happy with what I was coming up with. Explaining stuff and neat, simple coding aren't my strong suit...
But whatever, I will just give it a try.

I will focus on making the individual ...

Well, it's just guesswork by me, but I assume that the plate in the video actually deforms like if you grab a long wobbly stick in the center and shake it up and down. And at certain frequencies parts of the plate simply become static. The particles just get bounced around on the plate until they ...