Ray Tracing and Path Tracing in C++

 This homework coincided with a lot of deadlines of mine, that is why I could not manage to finish every aspect of it. I will be giving details of which parts of the ray tracer I could finish and which parts are left out later on this blog post. Prework I started this homework by discarding the parser.cpp given to us and creating a totally new parser..: My opinion about the XML format had been changing even before HW1 was released. I believe that XML is a ancient and useless file format. I compare the XML format to the internet's old but kept protocols, whose fields are just kept for the sake of backward compatibility. The reason I think so is the useless syntax (<,\). The dislike of XML format was only half of my motivation. The other half is about the nature of parser.cpp. The parser given to us is mostly unable to handle erroneous input. Giving undesirable segmentation faults. For example; in the homework 1, there was a scene with a near plane field of 5 numbers. That error w...

 In this homework, I could not finish on the time to submit a meaningful output, unfortunately. I will still submit the latest working snapshot of my ray tracer project, however, the snapshot I will upload does not handle the transformations. However small it is, I can explain my work since the submission of homework 1 till today in a couple of paragraphs and some screenshots. From the last homework, there were some issues in the lighting: The algorithm I used were precalculating the ambient and background lighting, and then not using those when computing the mirror and dielectric lighting. This resulted in pretty dark dielectric and mirror images. I started by fixing this issue. I also fixed another issue which caused the specular lighting to be on a wrong location. The issue was because of a non-normalized sum of w_i and w_o vectors, which was resulting in a weighted  normalized average of them. You can see below that the right one waas the desired image, where my result was...