Development Journal of a Raytracer

The sphere uses more geometry than before, but now the glossy reflections look very, very nice.

I was too tired today to actually create a new model, but as I see from the old test models I also don't need to. I like, how the bright copper colored spot on the sphere is mirrored on the plane, where it has a different form. Also I think it is very nice how the color changes from the dark color of the shadows to the bright green. Very nice, I guess I will use that shader a lot in the future.

But I also can't call the shader finished, with the second model the program crashes. The crash only appears with high rendering settings and without further information I have troubles to locate the point where it happens. In the debug version it is so slow, that I had to stop it without hitting the problem.

I will try again tomorrow, I will try to use the 64bit parallelized debug version. That should work quite fast and when it crashes I should be able to attach the debugger.

Model crashing the program sometimes.

But apart form that problem, the results also look great. You can even see the mirror image of the box on the floor. That is exactly what I had hoped for. And obviously that white corner at the lower right hand side was caused by the bugs. I also like how the brushed aluminium comes out, it looks much, much better than before.

I was too tired yesterday, but I had managed to get the program to accept linked materials. It was much easier than anticipated, as I seem to have taken out the asserts some time ago. I continued with it a bit today, the linked materials are now marked in the UI and the name of the master object is also displayed in the UI. And I started to add a button to unlink the material. That should be fairly easy to finish.

Then I need to extend the materials, they have to contain a list of the objects which link to them. I need that, so that when I change the material of the master object to a different shader, all the linked objects can be told to do the same. Technically that is not necessary to change the shader in all objects, it would be sufficient to make one of the other objects the master. But I think it will be easier if I have the correct links and only want to use a different shader.