Ray Tracer in AS3: Rendering the Mandelbulb in Flash

So I went off for a few hours and thought how I could improve the voxel engine. Both from an efficiency perspective as well as that of realism.

I realised that the only route was ray tracing and after reading this fantastic article by SuperJer about his pixel machine experiment I was motivated and inspired to try something along these lines for my renderer.

The article takes the creation of a ray tracer from its very early stages to a really polished program. All this happens in one weekend by the way, I really suggest you read it.

Anyway the idea behind raytracing is that a ray of light is passed from your camera through a pixel on the screen. The ray formed between the two points continues to pass through your scene until it hits something. When it hits something the pixel through which the ray passed is updated with the colour value of the object it hit, or failing that the colour of the sky behind, and a ray is "fired" through the next pixel until your image is formed.

So in my case I'm trying to render the Mandulbulb set. Something I've now done many times before, but lets be honest, in the past I've needed huge numbers of voxels and the results weren't great. So what happens in the ray tracer?

1. I fire a ray through the current pixel - starting at 0,0 working all the way to the image width/height.

2. I check along the length of the ray to see if that location is a part of the Mandelbulb Set.

3. If it is - check if that point is in light or shade.

4. Fire another ray from this point to my light source.

5. Check a bit away from this point in the direction of the light source, if that point is also a member then any light from the light source would have been stopped. So shadow the pixel.

6. Otherwise colour the pixel normally.

The resulting images that are built up show a lot more detail. Not only that they have pixel perfect shadowing, perspective, rotation and you can't see any stupid voxels.

Lets take a look below at some ray tracing in flash. Below you can see increasing resolutions from
137 x 100 to 1100 x 800 pixels.

And below is one I left to render for about an hour (2200 x 1600 pixels). Just click to enlarge it!