c-ray-tracer

This is my first attempt at writing a ray tracer and is done with the C programming language. C was used because ray tracing can be a CPU-intensive process and an efficient language is needed. This program currently takes it's input in NFF format, as provided by the Standard Procedural Databases.

There are several improvements which I would make if I had the time:

• Support for more objects. This currently supports concave polygons, spheres and triangles, but cones and convex polygons would be nice too.
• Support for more inputs. This currently only supports input in NFF format, but could probably be easily changed to using different input formats. I'm not sure what the standard graphics input formats are, so if somebody could give me recommendations of good graphics description formats, please let me know.
• Fix to the refraction code. I haven't been able to test this very well, but I have the feeling it doesn't quite work.
• Support for different output formats. If this were hooked up to the GD library, it could easily output to .gif, .png, .jpg...
• Improvement in the math. Currently there are a couple of places where I have to multiply vectors by a negative. I don't know if this is a bug in my code or in the NFF code being supplied, but there's definitely a bug somewhere.
• Efficiency improvements. This could be sped up by doing bounding boxes so that all the objects don't have to be parsed, hooking it up to POSIX pthreads and many other things I probably haven't thought of.

Download: c-ray-tracer.tar.gz

Example Renderings: