Program Features

(0) Basic ray tracing, ambient, diffuse, specular, shadow, transparency.
(1) Reflection
(2) Refraction. My program is able to do refraction for continuous changing media without air/vacuum interfering in between. For example, a big ball contains a small ball and both of them are translucent and of different index of refraction.
(3) Geometry includes sphere, general shaped polygon (even including concave polygon) and plane.
(4) Objects include fully opaque, translucent, fully translucent, fully reflective and partially reflective.
(5) Super sampling, soft shadow.
(6) Recursive ray trace controlled by arbitrary user-defined level threshold and ray-traveled distance threshold.
(7) Texture map and bump map on sphere object, checkerboard pattern on infinite plane.
(8) Program runs faster than POV-Ray for the test scenes.
(9) Program is able to output both PPM P6 raw format and 24-bit BMP format.
(10) Use yacc/lex parser to parse POV configuration file.
(11) I wrote my own numerical library for vector and matrix computation, employing template meta-programming and expression template techniques as well as latest features from the incoming new C++ standard.