The Dark Project
I’m going mental over this and this.
The former has weird dark patches that I cannot explain (though I have a feeling that it’s something to do with either my value for epsilon or my normal mapping code), and the latter is just too dark. This isn’t a problem with my raytracer: I’m just an incompetent artist. I attempted to lighten it up in this image, but it just reveals more artefacts.
I also have an issue with 3D Studio Max. It’s driving me crazy. In the .3ds file format, there are entries for emissive colour, refractive index and shininess. After some poking around the material editor I found all of these properties and set them accordingly. However, when I export them from Max to .3ds format, these values remain stubbornly blank. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong or how to fix it.
Finally, that shot with the light coming through the window is not a cheap hack or projected texture. It is actually taking a light source and it is accumulating colour through translucent surfaces using the alpha component of the texture, meaning that I can put the light anywhere and get accurate results. Obviously the light would bend if going through a refractive surface, but there exists no solution to this in standard Whitted raytracing.
Ugh. 3:30 am now … I should really sleep.