vert good starting point for new people to raytracing.

[Mark_Larson]

  Jacco Bikker wrote the article.  It goes into a lot of detail of how raytracing works.  And also includes sample code in C++.  It has 7 different parts.  The link is for the first part.  He also links to different PDFs that also talk about it.  It's a very good starting point.  I am making this sticky.

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Raytracing_Topics_Techniques-Part_1_Introduction.shtml

enjoy.

[FORTRANS]

   Would mentioning POVRay be considered on-topic?

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer
http://www.povray.org/

Regards,

Steve N.

[Mark_Larson]

 just to clarify, povray isn't a realtime raytracer.  It takes many seconds to render each frame.  We are interested in doing it in a game, so it has to be realtime.

  So what use is povray?  Well you can browse the source code, and get ideas about raytracing and learn more.  But the source code is also very big.  It is a bit advanced, so take that into account.

  So I recommend looking at radius.  It's good sized, but not huge.  Runs under Windows and Linux.  Runs 32-bit and 64-bit for both OSes.  It can use gcc, icc, or msvc, in either Linux or Windows.  I've compiled it under Windows using mingw and gcc.

https://gna.org/projects/radius/

the code was converted to run under Cuda by someone else, currently it only runs under Windows.

http://bouliiii.blogspot.com/2008/08/real-time-ray-tracing-with-cuda-100.html

[Mark Jones]

https://gna.org/projects/radius/

Hmm, I'm not seeing any files there, nor any SVN data.

[Mark_Larson]

you have to do a command line SVN command to the server to get the code.  He has it on one his webpages the command to use.  I haven't tried it in a while.  So it might not be there at all. You can browse the code under one of the links. 

EDIT2: don't use the snapshot, it is empty. I'll see if I can pull down the source code using Svn, and then upload a .zip file

EDIT:

Daily snapshot:
http://svn.gna.org/daily/radius-snapshot.tar.gz


and click on this link to browse the sources on the webpage
http://cvs.gna.org/cvsweb/?cvsroot=radius


Using SVN to get the source code

This project's Subversion repository can be checked out through anonymous access over the SVN protocol (TCP 3690), or over http. Depending on your network configuration you may prefer to use one or the other (for instance, if your internet access goes through a web proxy, it's unlikely that access over http will work).

Checkout over SVN protocol (TCP 3690):

svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/radius/trunk radius

Checkout over http:

svn co http://svn.gna.org/svn/radius/trunk radius

Note that these two commands assume that the repository is using the recommended layout tags/ branches/ trunk/ at the toplevel. The example will download the tree under trunk/ in the repository and place it in a directory named after the project.

Using CVS to get the source code

Anonymous CVS Access

This project's CVS repository can be checked out through anonymous (pserver) CVS with the following instruction set. The module you wish to check out must be specified as the modulename. When prompted for a password for anonymous, simply press the Enter key.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gna.org:/cvs/radius co <modulename>

When you update from within the module's directory (with cvs update) you do not need the -d option anymore.
Project Member CVS Access via SSH

Only project members can access the CVS tree via this method. SSH must be installed on your client machine.

You have to register a SSH key and set the environment variable CVS_RSH. Check the Cookbook for more details.

export CVS_RSH=ssh

cvs -d <membername>@cvs.gna.org:/cvs/radius co <modulename>

[Mark_Larson]

I couldn't get SVN or the snapshot to work, but I did get CVS to work.  Here is the source code.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Mark Jones]

Interesting, thanks for finding a working repository. I tried all but the CVS, go figure. :wink

[Mark_Larson]

not a problem