The Ray Tracer Challenge

Chapter 13Cylinders

Next up is the mighty cylinder. It plays nicely with your existing suite of graphics primitives, and it’s fantastic for representing all sorts of things: arms, legs, necks, fingers, and torsos, as well as columns, pipes, and table legs. Here’s an example of cylinders in various configurations to give you a taste of how versatile this shape can be:

As with all your other shapes, you’ll use cylinders by instantiating them at the origin and then transforming them into the size and position you need. For convenience, you’ll give the cylinders a default radius of 1, but the way the math works out they’ll all be infinitely long, ...