Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 19

Ray-Object Intersections

Image by Mark Langsworth

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

• understand how bounding boxes can decrease rendering times;
• know how to ray trace a number of object types including triangles and part objects;
• understand why we can only ray trace generic versions of some objects;
• understand the important role that compound objects play in modeling;
• have at your disposal a variety of objects for scene construction.

This chapter allows you to start building a decent collection of object types for modeling and rendering. I’ll discuss here how to ray trace axis-aligned bounding boxes as an efficiency ...