February 2019
Intermediate to advanced
292 pages
6h 55m
English
Your ray tracer is really starting to come together. Just look at it! You’ve got spheres, realistic shading, a powerful camera, and a world that supports scenes with many objects.
It’s a pity those objects don’t cast shadows, though. Shadows add a delightful dash of realism to a scene. Check out the following figure which shows the same scene both with and without shadows:

Your brain uses those shadows as cues for depth perception. Without shadows, the image looks artificial and shallow, and that will never do.
Thus, the time has come to add shadows, and the best part is that you’ve already written most of the infrastructure ...
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