February 2019
Intermediate to advanced
292 pages
6h 55m
English
Content preview from The Ray Tracer Challenge
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Chapter 15Triangles
The final primitive in your ray tracer might seem an odd choice: the triangle. By itself, its utility is perhaps questionable, but where it really shines is when you use hundreds or thousands of them together to construct a surface.
Here’s an example of a scene composed of more than fifteen thousand triangles:
In the purple teddy bear, you can clearly see the facets and planes that betray the model’s triangular composition. Even the cow, if you take a magnifying glass to the image, would show similar (if finer) faceting. But that teapot, now! Is it truly composed of triangles as well?
Oh, yes, it is. And in this chapter you’ll ...
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