OpenGL - very basic ray tracing experiments
These are just some preliminary experiments with ray tracing.
My understanding of the topic is quite limited, and I aim to improve it through these tests.
This implementation is fairly basic: rather than casting multiple rays to achieve a more accurate diffuse component, I just use the same basic formulas for diffuse and specular lighting typically applied in forward rendering.
One of the advantages of ray tracing is that certain features, such as shadows and reflection, which can be complex to implement in forward rendering, comes for free (in terms of implementation effort), since they are naturally handled through the same ray-scene intersection functions (or their simplified versions) you have already implemented.