I'm still confused about what you want. Google says: "In computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for generating an Image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects." which is pretty much what I understand under ray tracing. So what is your goal? Usually ray tracing is used when you want a realistically lit render(plot) of a 3d scene, or if you have some implicitely defined geometry ( like steve kelly pointed out). Usually you have a mesh in an obj file, which you would only ray trace when you need photo realism (since it's way slower then any other displaying method). I'm really unsure, why you want to get out a 3d matrix in the end. Do you want to compute a lightfield?! Or do you want to have an interpolated voxel representation of that mesh in a dense volume? This is probably not what you really want and also not what a ray tracer produces. The last thing I can imagine is, that you actually have only vertices(points) in your obj file without any faces, which then wouldn't really show up in a plot, so that you started assuming it's not dense enough. I wouldn't call pointclouds a complex geometry though, since its one of the most simplest. If that's the case, you should just visualize them as particles. Here is how you would do that in GLVisualize: Using FileIO, GLVisualize obj = load("pathtoobj.obj") points = vertices(obj) w,r = glscreen() view(visualize(points)) r()
If you have problems with that example, please file an issue on github under GLVisualize.jl. Best, Simon