After dealing with surface properties in our previous articles, we'll go a bit more in depth of what a raytracer allows us to do easily.

One of the interesting property of ray tracing is to be independent of the model of camera, and that is what makes it possible to simulate advanced camera model with only slight code modification. The model we'll explore in this page is the one of the pin hole camera with a conic projection and a depth of field. Another interesting property is that contrary to a lot of other rendering methods such as rasterization, adding implicit objects is the matter of defining that object equation and intersection, in some cases (spheres) it is easier to compute intersection with the implicit object than it is with the equivalent triangle based one. Spheres are one possible implicitly defined primitive. We'll add a new one which we'll call blobs. Finally ray tracing is good for reflections as we've seen in our previous articles, but it can as easily simulate another physical effect called refraction. Refraction is a property of transparent objects, allowing us to draw glass-like or water-like surfaces.