I always wanted to have my own raytracer. Not as cool as 3D studio max or Maya, but still cool from a VB6 point of view i guess.
The core is from VB Lover of VBFrance forums. He made the basic raytracing math and rendering engine, so most props go to him. Well i started making it more usable, adding material/Light/Objects editors, Image handling, file handling and so on. Some other parts from various sources in the internet.
I kinda lost interest after it was half done, so the basics work, but for example the material editor shows existing materials but will not let you edit or add any. Same for the lights/objects editors, but at least the mat editor already does a neat rendered preview of the material. The texture projection for spheres is not really highly realistic, it's a classic projection instead of a classic mapping. The mathematical model for this could be overhauled. Also bump/texture settings should become a property of the material class, bump settings are global (yuck).
Oh yeah and i wanted to add least add some half-asses animation scripting or at least a camera animation. Well never did it though.
Also added a cute preview rendering function, menus, easier controls and a basic function to save the scene. I kinda stopped at the scene loading mechanism as first the fixed picturebox textures/bumps (hidden to end user, doh!) should be replaced by a neat file loader, file references in the class and so on before it really makes sense to finish the loader/saver. I made a basic save file model that is neat to base on as it's quite easy to load (HTML Tag style).
SO that's left to do, also some cosmetic stuff like when you click render while it is still rendering it screws up and so on.
What's really cool in here is the jpeg function which does NOT use a dll, so all JPEG compression/encoding stuff is done in pure VB6, try to find that elsewhere. Also it features common dialogues but doe not require the comdlg runtime references in windows as it's all made completely in VB6. Image postwork effects use GDI library, i always wanted to add some GDI-less effects but been to lazy to do so. Besides that it really doesn't have dependencies. I originally wanted to make a completely dependency free raytracer and completely in VB6. Maybe imma get to it later on again, but for the moment i got bored with it.
I kinda wanna dedicate it to Joe so i won't post the source anywhere else.
So enjoy and lemme know if you make any improvements to it. Oh and yay free picture of me as a texture, print out for your dart board!
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