tecla / rayito

Simple ray tracing tutorials

Rayito

These are simple ray tracing tutorials, proceeding in stages to help learners start simple. They are designed to help provide enough infrastructure to get going right away, but not so much that the learner isn't force to experiment and try things out on their own.

It is highly encouraged to start with stage 1, and experiment with it and try to understand it. Then move on to the next stage, do the same, and so forth.

Stage 4 is, for now, the same as stage 3, and the Qt version is for those who want to have a GUI to experiment with. Stage 5 and onward will use the Qt GUI.

Stage 6 adds a BVH acceleration structure, and polygon meshes (with an OBJ reader too).

Stage 7 adds transformations (and quaternions), keyed with animation, and motion blur support, as well as a pure reflection BRDF.

Don't be afraid to break things, crash, etc. It's good for the soul!

Please see the following blog posts for more info:

http://renderspud.blogspot.com/2012/04/basic-ray-tracer-stage-1.html
http://renderspud.blogspot.com/2012/04/basic-ray-tracer-stage-2.html
http://renderspud.blogspot.com/2012/04/basic-ray-tracer-stage-3.html
http://renderspud.blogspot.com/2014/03/basic-ray-tracer-stages-4-and-5.html http://renderspud.blogspot.com/2014/04/basic-ray-tracer-stage-6.html http://renderspud.blogspot.com/2014/04/not-so-basic-ray-tracer-stage-7.html

rayito's Issues

Too talented

Could you try being less talented? You make everyone else look bad.

Segfault while calling sampleSurface on a mesh when u3 == 1.0

Hi Mike,

So I'm getting a segfault in Stage7/RMesh.h:158. I'm pretty sure it's only when the passed-in variable u3 is exactly 1.0. I should also note that my mesh has only one rectangular face.

But then there's this bit of code that is worrisome:
151: if (iter == m_faceAreaCDF.end())
152: faceIndex = m_faceAreaCDF.size() - 1;
...
158: float faceArea = m_faceAreaCDF[ faceIndex + 1 ] - m_faceAreaCDF[faceIndex];

So on line 152 faceIndex is set to the maximum index, then on line 158, you add 1 to it.

Progress bar, live update of render, better multithreading (enhancement request)

It'd be really helpful to have some sort of indication of the progress of the render. A progress bar would work, but it'd be cool to have live updates of the render.

Also, I wonder if render times could be faster with render worker threads and a job queue. So it'd split the image up into chunks of a predefined size, instead of into a predefined number of chunks.

What do you think? Worth adding? With your blessing, I could maybe tackle this.