Sister Ray-trace

“I couldn't hit it sideways
Ah, just like Sister Ray said” –Velvet Underground, Sister Ray

“Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it” -Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK

I saw this image the other day in Jane and Mark Burry’s excellent book The New Mathematics of Architecture and thought: “I can do that. I don’t really know what it means, but let’s figure out a good story.” Something about acoustic optimization, reverberation time, blah blah blah.

With this solid methodology in place, and unencumbered by any real knowledge, I put together this little tool that works as a generalized one bounce raytracer. Key to the construction of this family is this assumption of an ideal reflection of a ray. That is, an incoming ray is perfectly reflected off a surface relative to a normal line from the surface.