JeffreyCA / raytracer

Fast, efficient raytracer in C++ for CS 488 (University of Waterloo)

Raytracer

Raytracer developed for CS 488 Introduction to Computer Graphics (Winter 2020)

This was originally going to be my submission for the final project, but due to COVID-19 shutdown the project was cancelled.

---

Features

• Primitives: Cone, Cylinder, Cube, Sphere, Plane
• Triangle meshes (OBJ format), with support for vertex normals and texture coordinates
• Reflection (glossy and non-glossy)
• Refraction (glossy and non-glossy)
• Depth of field
• Texture mapping (planar, spherical, cylindrical, and custom meshes)
• Adaptive supersampling
• Animation (via Lua scripting and ffmpeg)
• Mesh rendering acceleration
  • Rectangular bounding volumes
  • 3D grid-based acceleration
• Multithreaded rendering

Build instructions

We use premake4 as our cross-platform build system. First you will need to build all the static libraries that the ray tracer depend on. To build the libraries, open up a terminal, and cd to the top level of the project directory (raytracer) and then run the following:

/raytracer$ premake4 gmake
/raytracer$ make

Next we can build the actual raytracing program:

/raytracer$ cd src/
/raytracer/src$ premake4 gmake
/raytracer/src$ make

Usage

Invoking the raytracer is simple. Simply execute the raytrace binary, passing it the path to the Lua scene file:

/raytracer/src$ ./raytrace path/to/scene.lua

Assets

The src/Assets directory contains some scene definitions, meshes, and textures used to produce the sample renders below. Some of the scenes were from the original CS 488 skeleton code.

Sample renders

Some sample renders can be found in src/out/ and src/showcase/.

Primitives	Mesh (flat shading)	Mesh (Phong shading)

Regular and glossy reflection	Regular refraction	Glossy refraction

Depth of field	Texture mapping (primitives)	Texture mapping (meshes)