I have posted previously about a simple terrain heightmap display program I have made, but never talked about some of the methods of generating and manipulating heightmap based terrain systems.

I added anti-aliasing to the rendering of the ray tracer. At first I tried regular sampling which is breaking a pixel down into smaller sub-pixels and shooting rays through the center of those pixels and averaging the result. This was better than nothing but still created some artifacts when rendering. The next trial was random sampling to replace aliasing with noise, but the samples can become clumped together and look unnatural. The method that I have settled on for now is jittered sampling which consists of breaking the target pixel down into sub-pixels and shooting rays at a random position through the sub-pixels so that each sub-pixels has at least one ray shot through it. Changing the amount of samples per pixel reduces the aliasing effect.

Just a quick update, my raytracing project - SimpleRTracer is now available on sourceforge at this address - https://simplertracer.sourceforge.net

Just thought I should update that the svn of my Astronomy work is live at https://owls-h1.sourceforge.net

Today I was kind of bored so I decided to write a simple particle system in XNA. The helpful tutorials over at https://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/ helped point me in the right direction. This particle system is very primitive at the moment, a particle emitter follows the mouse around the window. When I get the time (or the motivation) I am going to add a few more features such as different particles (smoke, water, fire, etc.), some different effects like attraction and repulsion and maybe the option to place multiple emitters in the scene.