Rendering Is Fun

Hello Gamedev!So you probably thought my ideas had been swept under the carpet since I posted my last blog entry  almost four months ago. Well, not at all! I'm actually making some good progress on my latest renderer, which you can already check out at my github page . There aren't too many features and it's not optimized yet, but I've been trying to get...

Hello Gamedev!

So my last entry of almost two months ago left on a note about light scattering, and this entry, which I'm sure you've all been waiting for with bated breath, will address this question at last, among others. I haven't been writing much code lately, due to time issues and - mostly - procrastination, however I had a lot of...

Transmission models are a bit more involved than reflection models. The basic ideal dielectric refractive model seen in many renders all over the net is nice and all, but it just doesn't cut it when you want rough transmission, such as in frosted glass.

The one displayed here is based on microfacet theory, which means we assume that the surface is not...

I haven't posted in a long time, but I have been quite busy with other things. I have recently turned my attention to spectral path tracing in an attempt to investigate the "purest" form of rendering. The results are... interesting.

Spectral path tracing is essentially the same as normal path tracing, except that instead of working with RGB...

Hello,
in my last entry (almost a month ago) I said I was working on implementing HDR to make renders look more... plausible. Here you go. These renders (a few glass spheres with fresnel reflection and caustics) are lit completely by an HDR environment map (quite low resolution), providing realistic direction-based lighting. The floor in the left render is...

This image was generated with my GPU. I added minimal texture support, for the floor plane, and as an environment map (basically, when a ray does not intersect any object, its direction vector is used to sample the environment map and that is used as an approximate lighting value). I was impressed at the convergence rate, the noise disappeared in literally...

I haven't posted in a long time - busy at uni. I have nevertheless been spending some time attempting to use OpenCL for path tracing. I made a quick, throwaway program, mostly used to check out how a GPU architecture would translate to simple, hardcoded ray tracing. The results are promising to say the least... this little cornell box scene attached has...

Hello reader,
check out my latest render HD Buddha:



I now have my three reference images which I will use to compare against and validate the upcoming Bidirectional Path tracer. They are:
- The standard Cornell Box with a glass sphere, only to test the correctness of the...

I just discovered the wierdest bug ever in my refraction (dieletric glass) code. One of the last few lines in its BSDF is this, which performs the actual refraction with computed angles (most of the code before is to do with Fresnel reflectance):

Ray.Direction := Ray.Direction * Index + Normal * (Index * Theta - Phi);

At some point in time,...

Hello,
this is my new journal to document the progress of the path tracer I'm currently working on. It has no name currently, so it's currently called MPPT (stands for Massively Parallel Path Tracing) because I designed a (basic) network protocol to work with it which allows remote computers to grab work units (small parts of a specific render) from...