CPU Ray Tracer
a mildly complex scene in close to real-time.
(3D mesh made by Ozne000)
Source code on GitHub
Why?
I wanted to learn some fundamental principles of graphics rendering without having to deal with the overhead of learning a graphics API at the same time.
Furthermore, I was interested in seeing how fast I can make this renderer run, without ratholing too much on any specific part while also minimizing dependencies.
Some achievements
I became more comfortable dealing with things like coordinate transformations, parsing and processing OBJ files, Compiling and running without the CRT, generating acceleration structures for ray-tracing and multi-threading.
Things to improve
Aside from the countless things that could be added, profiling and debug visualisation seem like the most important ones.
I was able to get away with no debug visualisation and only basic frame timing, due to the small scale and hard-coded nature of the project. But generally, these things are a must to gather real information about the run-time behaviour of a program, so that one can improve things in a reality-based manner.
Further experiments
There are some rendering features I would like to explore if I had infinite time and money.
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Soft shadows. Instead of using a bruteforced sampling approach, experiment with other techniques like ray-marching.
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Beyond Blinn-Phong. Try using BSDFs instead.
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...
Some more renders
