Bending light

BRL-CAD provides extensive facilities for representing geometry and a robust high-performance ray tracing library for interrogating geometry. BRL-CAD's LIBRT ray tracing library provides a means to shoot rays at geometry, obtain intersection hit points, obtain object thicknesses, and much more. BRL-CAD's LIBOPTICAL and LIBMULTISPECTRAL optics libraries control shooting rays with the intention of representing energy transport (e.g., light rays) with various possible outputs (such as rendering an image).

The existing ray tracers either shoot a grid of rays orthogonal to an image view plane or shoot rays divergent to a view plane for perspective images. The rays travel in a straight line until they hit something whereupon the optics library is called to calculate a color, usually for rendering pixels of a picture.

This task involves adding support for rays that don't necessarily traverse in a straight line. This will probably entail changes to either LIBOPTICAL and/or LIBRT. A proposal of changes will need to be written up and discussed beforehand. Any implementation of ray bending should be consistent with the existing API and will need to be maintainable within BRL-CAD's sources.

References

• src/librt
• src/liboptical
• src/rt/view*.c
• include/raytrace.h
• include/optical.h

Requirements

• Strong familiarity with C