What are caustics? A caustic is created when multiple rays of light pass through a medium and are cast onto the same surface area. This causes "brightened" areas to appear on the surface at various locations. Caustics occur through reflective and transmissive (refractive) mediums such as water, glass, mirrors, etc.

For my COSC 4V98 Project, I chose to extend my ray tracer to incorporate caustics. Since the basic ray tracing algorithm does not include global or indirect lighting, we'll need to make some significant changes to the algorithm.