Traditional image texture is one of the easiest and most visually appealing ways to improve the appearance of a scene. Basically, you take a scanned photograph, apply it to objects in your scene, using a mapping from the scene coordinates(x,y,z), to the image coordinates(u,v). In my ray tracer, I can specify the existence of a texture map on a material, and then specify an object that uses this material. I've currently only implemented texture mapping on polygons, so you need to specify a (u,v) coordinate for each point on the polygon, and I'll take care of the rest.

 

 

The first image was my first attempt at doing texturing. At this point I had also changed my color representation to using RGB (since it's MUCH easier to work with images in RGB, rather than trying to convert them to SPEC). I didn't quite get the lighting correct on this one, but I thought it was still quite an interesting photo, so I'm showing it.

 

 

The second image was much more correct. This one shows the bricks bitmap that I used for image mapping much better than the above one.  This also contains the proper sampling of the light source for my Direct Lighting calculation.

 

 

In many of my other images that I've produced, you can see results of my texture mapping code, so I didn't include those images here.