Having spent a lot of time on rasterizer based rendering, I've wanted to learn more about ray tracing, if only for the sake of curiosity. I also wanted to revisit ray casting, as it had been some time and I took some of the finer details for granted the first time around, so this time, I went through it with a fine toothcomb to make sure I got all of the details down. Given that the majority of speed is lost in blitting the columns to the screen in traditional ray casters, I decided to render…

At the moment, I’m still concentrating on transitioning to XNA, C# and HLSL, while revising some of the stuff I’ve done previously in OpenGL, but things are going okay in all. So far, I’ve got a working prototype for a deferred shading setup with normal mapping: Deferred Shading with Normal Mapping I also have basic shadow mapping, but I still am yet to include it in the deferred shader. However, here’s what the basic forward lighting shader looks like at the moment: Basic Shadow Mapping This…