What's up?

I've been quite inactive as of late. One reason being that I was truly inactive, the other being that my blog was locked temporarily because it was tagged as a "spam" blog!

Nevertheless, I'm back in action and I hope to start posting some things on one of my new interests: ray tracing. I have a ray tracer up and running and things are going pretty good so far. Current features include:

• Standard reflection + refraction (no special laws yet like, for example, Fresnel)
• Several geometries: triangles, planes, spheres, boxes, quads, and cylinders
  
• Anti-aliasing
• Lighting: area, point, directional
• Diffuse reflections

And some plans for the near future:

• Support for loading several common model files
• A space partitioning scheme to reduce rendering time
• Transformed geometry (i.e., geometry + transformation matrix)
• Support for instancing (multiple instances of the same geometry)
• Python bindings to control/define scenes and the ray tracer
  
• Photon mapping
• Radiosity rendering

But some of those will take time. The list is sorted in order of highest priority at the top, to the lowest priority at the bottom. That's about it. And just to whet your appetite, I will leave you with my most current rendering: