Nikola Bunjevac

Ray Tracing in a Weekend

Realistic imagery generated by ray tracing has always fascinated me. I wanted to learn how it was even possible to create such realistic renderings. I also believe that the best way to learn something is to try it out yourself. Therefore this was an awesome chance to try and implement a simple ray tracer.

Fun fact: this is not my first ray tracer! I also did one very simple one for my undergraduate Interactive Computer Graphics course.

After implementing all the components and verifying that it works, I wanted to make it faster. First thing I did was to parallelize it. You can read a short write-up of the process of parallelization on my blog.

I also wanted to see the rendering process in real time so I implemented a progress viewer using SFML library.

Here are some images:

A recreation of the image on the front page of the book.
A recreation of the image on the front page of the book.
Visualization of the progress.
Visualization of the progress.
Using larger tiles.
Using larger tiles.

For more, visit my Github profile.

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