A Very Basic, Very Slow Ray Tracer

Despite my infatuation with computer graphics, somehow I never got around to taking a graphics course while at Princeton. To make amends, over a couple of days last year, and with a lot of hand holding from Peter Shirley via his excellent book Ray Tracing in One Weekend, I wrote a ray tracer.

It’s not particularly sophisticated, and boy is it slow – but still, it’s a ray tracer! Beyond what’s in Peter’s book, I added few optimizations, the ability to animate the camera, and primitive multi-threading. I put this all to work to create this animation, which took about 130 hours to render on an iMac.