In this post I will give you a glimpse of what computer graphics algorithms may look like. I will explain the ray tracing algorithm and show a simple implementation in Python.
By the end of this article you’ll be able to make a program that will generate the above image, without making use of any fancy graphic library! Only NumPy. Isn’t it crazy?! Let’s dive in!
P.S. This article is by no mean a complete guide / explanation of ray tracing, since this is such a vast subject, but rather an introduction for curious people :)
Prerequisites
We only need very basic vector geometry.
- If you have 2 points A and B — whatever the dimensionality: 1, 2, 3, …, n — then a vector that goes from
AtoBcan be found by computingB — A(element-wise); - The length of a vector — whatever the dimensionality — can be found by computing the square root of the sum of the squared components. The length of a vector
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