Ray tracing engine

A C++ based renderer developed from scratch. It utilizes either ray tracing or path tracing to render a scene. The renderer supports global illumination, microfacet reflections, shadows, and area lights. Rendering can be done either with or without construction of a photon map.

Most of the theory from the Image Synthesis course and the Physically Based Rendering book.

Examples

Ray Tracing	Path Tracing

Ray tracing with Photon Mapping	Path tracing with Photon Mapping

Usage

Compiling

$ git clone https://github.com/nikitakaraevv/ray-tracing-engine
$ cd ray-tracing-engine
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

Running

Rendering can be started by ./RayTracer and a set of input arguments to customize the process. You can take a look at the list of available arguments by calling ./RayTracer -help. Note that none of the parameters is mandatory for rendering since default values will be assigned to them at the beginning.

Here is a typical running command and some comments:

• ./RayTracer -width 420 -height 420 -m 1 -N 128 -p 50000 -k 10
  • The output image will be of size 420x420.
  • -m defines mode of rendering. 0 is for ray tracing, 1 for path tracing.
  • The number of traced rays through each pixel will be defined by -N.
  • If -p is used, renderer will create a photon map and use it to render the image. -k indicates number of nearest photons to be considered during rendering.
  • In addition the renderer saves intermediate results to update.ppm.

Author

Nikita Karaev