Glowing Cores Pattern

By Hansel Jia

  1. Anti-Aliasing What it does: Instead of shooting one ray through the center of each pixel, shoot 16 rays at random positions within the pixel and average their colors. This smooths out edges where object boundaries cross pixel boundaries.

  2. Refraction What it does: When a ray hits a transparent surface, use Snell’s law to compute the refracted ray direction based on the material’s index of refraction. The fresnel equation is used internally to blend between reflection and refraction.

  3. Emissive Materials What it does: Before computing Blinn-Phong shading we initialize the pixel color with the material’s emission value, which gives them a base brightness.

Ior, transparency, and emission are also added as additional fields in material.h