Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 27

Simple Transparency

Photograph courtesy of Steve Agland

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

• understand the concepts and physical processes of transparency;
• understand the practical issues involved in correctly ray tracing transparent objects;
• understand how a simplified model of transparency is implemented in ray tracing;
• have added the ability to ray trace transparent objects to your ray tracer;
• have ray traced a variety of transparent objects.

Transparency is my favorite ray-tracing topic. Ray tracing can accurately simulate the natural beauty of transparent objects, such as the sphere in the photograph on the first ...