About the project

This was a project I did to learn about different state-of--the-art ray tracing techniques and how to implement them. This ray tracing engine supports the tracing methods whitted ray tracing, monte-carlo path tracing and photon mapping. It supports diffuse, reflective, refractive and transparent materials. The primitives supported are planes and spheres. In terms of lighting it supports spot lights, directional lights and point lights. The engine also supports textures and skybox. Additionally the engine comes with a simple interface and a free camera to move around the scene. To speed things up in scenes with a large number of primitives, I implemented a BVH (bounding volume hierarchy) acceleration structure, which is built using the surface area heuristic and binning.