Ray Tracing and Path Tracing in C++

Hello. In this blog, I will share my journey in developing adaptive sampling systems for path tracing. This will not be the only thing as I will be also making important changes of my current path tracer. Let me start! Preword I chose my project topic to adaptive sampling. My older project idea was about spectral tracing since I thought the visual quality of spectral rendering images'd be nice. However, our 3rd homework and the ones that follow that changed my view as I felt the current bottleneck of my path tracer (and the current tracers) is the noise. There are lots of explored, partially explored and unexplored ways to improve efficiency -reducing noise is one of them- in path tracing. When we implemented sampling methods in path tracing, the first issue I thought of was that a lot of the samples were redundant. For example, we may spend a substantial amount of time to send 1000 samples into background to only get the same value from all of them. Adaptive sampling is a class of...

In this homework, I started by running my ray tracer on some scenes from previous which were once taking too long or was being rendered incorrectly that I never had a full render. Previous Homework Scenes Here is one of the outputs: One other result was as follows: Here, the left meshes (instances) look funny, because its materials were not initialized. Part 2: Parsing Sponza So, I solved this bug and then decided to start with the scene Sponza. I had not implemented the homework 6 topics yet, and the sponza scene had .bin files with it. Which means that if I implement the needed stuff and then try these on the Sponza scene, I will unlikely to know if the buggy results are because of my implementations of rendering algorithms or the problem is about the binary files. If you remember from the previous homeworks, I once created a viewing debugger which was showing a vertex for each triangle on the scene. I removed that code; because after I -as most of the people taking this course now- ...