Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 24

Mirror Reflection

Reflective spheres by Burt Flugleman, Rundle Street Mall, Adelaide. Photograph by Kevin Suffern.

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

• understand how mirror reflections are modeled in ray tracing;
• have seen some interesting examples of reflections;
• have implemented a reflective material.

I’ll discuss here how ray tracing simulates part of the indirect illumination in a scene. This ray-tracing technique was first developed by Whitted (1980) and is often referred to as Whitted-style ray tracing. Up until now, we have only ray traced the primary rays, but here we will trace the reflected rays as they ...