It's going to take me considerably longer than one weekend to build out a ray tracer...
Last time, I laid the groundwork to construct a PPM image and output a simple gradient image, like the one below.
This time around, I'm going to focus on building some useful abstractions that will make work going forward easier. This is going to focus on two areas:
- A Vector3 class, which will be helpful for representing 3D points, directional vector, RGB colors and offsets. We'll implement some useful operators and geometric methods in addition.
- A Bitmap class, which will represent our output raster and handle the details of saving that raster out as a PPM image file.
Ultimately, we'll be producing the same image as in the last installment, but with considerably less boilerplate code, and lay the groundwork for making our lives much easier going forward when we get to some more meaty topics. As always, the full code is available on GitHub, but I'll be presenting the full code for this example in this post.
