Path tracer in C++ following Peter Shirley's "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" series. This was a learning exercise. As it is the age of AI, I feel I am obligated to write let you know that this project was written by hand! Note that some of the boiler plate code was taken from the book I followed along from.
- Indirect lighting (objects illuminate each other)
- Anti-aliasing via random sampling
- Materials: lambertian diffuse, metals, glass/dielectrics
- Adjustable camera position and focus depth
Images are created by each pixel firing multiple rays with slight random offsets for anti-aliasing. Rays bounce around the scene accumulating color until they hit a light source or max out on bounces.
Dielectrics (glass) were the trickiest - had to implement Schlick's approximation for reflectance at grazing angles, otherwise glass looked wrong at the edges.
Renders to PPM format. The image above took about 2 minutes at 1200x800 with 500 samples per pixel.