Ray Tracing Engine
A CPU-based ray tracer exploring advanced lighting models, shadows, and post-processing effects. Built from scratch to understand the fundamentals of light transport.
Core Features
The engine implements a complete ray-tracing pipeline including:
- BVH Traversal: Efficient bounding volume hierarchy for fast ray-scene intersections.
- Lighting Models: Support for Point, Segment, and Parallelogram area lights.
- Post-Processing: Bloom and Depth of Field effects applied after rendering.
Shading Models
Implemented and compared multiple shading models including Phong, Blinn-Phong, and a custom Linear Gradient shader. The comparison model below highlights the differences in specular highlights.
- Red: Phong dominant (sharp, intense highlights).
- Cyan: Blinn-Phong dominant (broader, softer highlights).
- Gray: Similar contribution.
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Lights & Shadows
Visibility is calculated using both binary and transparency-based methods. Debug rays visualize the path from intersection points to light sources.
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Area Lights
Implemented segment and parallelogram lights to create realistic soft shadows. These require multiple samples per pixel to converge.
Bloom Effect
The bloom pipeline extracts bright pixels using a threshold, blurs them using a separable Gaussian filter with binomial coefficients, and adds them back to the scene.
Depth of Field
Simulates a thin lens camera. For each pixel, multiple rays are generated by sampling random points on a lens disk, directing them towards a focal point on the image plane.
