Ray-tracing implicit functions

• Main Author: Stephani Puspita Kurniawan
• Other Authors: Alexei Sourin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computing methodologies::Computer graphics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59745
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray) is an open source ray tracer program that is widely used to render an image based on certain source code. One feature that makes POV-Ray outperform other ray tracers is that the images it rendered are high in quality and photo-realistic. Currently, POV-Ray is able to render images defined in wide variety of functions defined in its source code, including a single line user defined implicit function. This project aims for an improvement on POV-Ray which will allow it to render images from more complicated implicit functions in the form of VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) script. To achieve this, a new class to read and calculate VRML script input is implemented and an external parser is used to support compiling multiple lines of implicit function defined in VRML. Once the improvement is developed, POV-Ray will be able to read any implicit function defined in VRML script and render to get a high quality image.