i'm studying raytracing and i create a "world" to practice programming skill. the world consists of two balls which i can alter their positions, sizes and refractive indices. they don't have any colors or textures. they only reflect and refract. the only light source / color source is the background which is an infinitely large color palette with checker box pattern. at first everything looks normal and behaves as expected but when i make the balls intersect strange patterns emerge. when i zoom into those patterns and eventually move the camera inside a ball more strange patterns emerge
let me break down the steps of their creation * when a ray hits an interface reflection always occurs * if snell's equation has solution refraction also occurs. in this case the proportion of the ray going to refraction is determined by schlick's approximation * if snell's equation has no solution 100% of the ray goes to reflection * the program iterate 64 recursive calls for each ray. if it fails to reach the background and get color it returns a grey scale random noise indicating "no data"
when the camera is outside of the balls, 64 iterations are enough to trace every ray. but if the camera (view point) is inside a ball with refractive index >1 total internal reflection may occur and there's no hope to escape and get any color
i see many distorted, disjointed and chaotic patterns when i look "inside". i'm not certain they're fractal
it's a math thing more than a physics thing as in real life it's impossible to place an camera inside a glass ball. even if you can, you can't make the camera invisible. when viewing from inside and when total internal reflection occurs, it quite probable the camera would see the reflection of itself