Initial Photon Scattering

Finally, after many battles, I have simple photon scattering.

First, I ported my existing intersection code from the shader to Javascript. I realize that this is code duplication, but I feel that it is necessary since I see that photon mapping should be done on the CPU side. (Also, this is a question that should be addressed later.) Next I moved the scene list over to Javascript, which is then passed down to the shader. Here, I didn't handle shape types -- for shapes, I have lists of positions, radii, and colors; I didn't want to add another for types. So at the moment photon scattering only works with spheres. To support cubes, I'm planning to pass a different list down to the shader for each shape. Probably not a good idea for extensibility, but it is the most efficient in terms of memory.

Then I performed photon scattering by shooting rays, storing their position and color as they hit objects, and recursing on the reflected rays. At this point, I don't have the correct power/color computation. I'm only directly storing color as they are absorbed, just to see if I can do it correctly.

Next step would be to do correct photon scattering, which involves correct power adjustment and Russian Roulette method for absorption.

Here is a screen shot of photons visualized over a ray traced scene. The color showing is the color of the previous reflected surface, and each photon can be traced correctly.