This project started for an advanced graphics course at university, and I have continued to add features and improvements over time. This is a fully functional Whitted-style ray tracing framework supporting reflections, refractions, and shadows. The framework is capable of rendering scene description files supporting simple geometric primitives and models.
The following is a list of features that have been implemented:
- Loading scene description files
- Shapes and primitives including:
- Spheres
- Planes
- Triangles
- Cubes
- Rectangles
- Cones
- Loading basic model object files (*.obj)
- Shadows
- Solid Constructive Geometry
- Materials
- Perlin Noise
- Light sources:
- Point light
- Directional light
- Phong illumination
- Distributed ray tracing effects:
- Depth of field
- Glossy reflections
- Motion blur (of spheres)
- Soft shadows
- Render scenes to TGA and bitmap formats
A few renders from the framework.
 Depth of field with far focus example |
 Solid Constructive Geometry example |
 Teapot model rendering with a wood checked floor |
 Lots of shapes with glossy reflections |
The ray tracer is written in C++, where the source code was initially developed on a Unix system using the g++ compiler, but has since been migrated to using Microsoft Visual Studio. Although it has been a number of years, it still builds using g++ and a handy makefile with minimal changes (disabling bitmap support).
Command line helper files have been provided that load the scenes and set support parameters.
Simon Flannery