Pure-C# ray tracer - zero external assets

Mirrors, glass, and light, traced for real.

Reality Optics is a recursive Whitted ray tracer written entirely in C# over the .NET base library - no engine, no shaders, no image files. Every reflection is a real bounced ray, every shadow is a real visibility test, and glass really refracts. Color is solved in linear space and tonemapped at output; the same lighting solver runs inside the reflections, so coloured per-light shadows show up in the mirror too.

9/9 optics invariants pass
Fresnel-Schlick reflectance
Beer-Lambert glass tint
~4.8s to render both scenes
0 warnings / 0 errors

Hall-of-mirrors beauty render from three cameras with an orbiting coloured light

Hall of mirrors - recursive reflection

Three cameras, 32 frames. A silver panel row swept 0.00 -> 0.50 roughness (sharp mirror to glossy blur) while a coloured light orbits, so the reflected room visibly moves.

Beauty still: reflective spheres, a glass disc and a stained panel under a warm point light

Beauty pass - linear light transport

One frame, tonemapped. A chrome sphere, a red glass cube and a caustic-lit stained panel share a floor lit by a single warm point light.

Reflection-vector AOV: mirrored ray directions encoded as red-green-blue

Reflection vectors - AOV

The direction of the bounced ray at each pixel, mapped to RGB. Curved surfaces sweep the full colour wheel; flats hold one hue.

Fresnel AOV: reflectance rising toward grazing angles, bright rims and dark centres

Fresnel reflectance - AOV

Schlick's approximation: reflectance climbs toward grazing angles. Edges go bright, surfaces facing the camera stay dark.

Mirror mask - AOV

Which surfaces spawned a recursive reflection ray this frame - the exact footprint the mirror shader recursed into.

Six-panel debug sweep: beauty, reflection vector, Fresnel, roughness, mirror mask and recursion depth

Six-panel decomposition - the proof

Beauty, reflect-vector, Fresnel, roughness, mirror mask and recursion depth, all animated together. Beauty and proof in one frame - nothing is faked.