Light simulation is a mathematical model that simulates light coming from sources and interacting with objects in the simulation environment. There are several ways to do this. In this project, most of the simulation is done by ray-tracing. Ray tracing is the process of calculating the amount of light on a pixel at the back of a simulated camera by following the direction that the light arrived on the pixel from and figuring out all the sources and objects that the light came from.
The pictures generated by ray tracing often look beautiful and are considered art. For that reason, I made this page, based on a semester worth of work from a college class on light simulation. Each link below goes to a chapter that contains images and how they were made.
The images here were rendered with a gamma of 2.2 unless otherwise posted. And they were super sampled with 16 rays for each pixel, unless otherwise posted.