Path Tracer
Tech Stack
Team size: 2
Time frame: 2 months
GitHub →Overview
This project was developed as part of my computer graphics coursework, with the goal of creating a path tracer from scratch and exploring the fundamentals of ray tracing and global illumination.
The project focused on implementing realistic light simulation through ray-object intersections, material properties, and light transport. I also investigated optimization techniques to improve rendering performance when handling complex scenes.
Introduction
This project was developed as part of my computer graphics coursework, with the goal of creating a path tracer from scratch and exploring the fundamentals of ray tracing and global illumination.
The project focused on implementing realistic light simulation through ray-object intersections, material properties, and light transport. I contributed to the implementation of rendering algorithms, acceleration structures, and performance optimizations for handling complex scenes.
Challenges
One of the main challenges was improving rendering performance while maintaining realistic results.
Ray tracing requires testing many ray-object intersections, which becomes expensive as scene complexity increases. Together with my partner, a KD-tree acceleration structure was implemented to reduce unnecessary calculations and improve intersection performance.
Results
The final result was a functional C++ path tracer capable of rendering scenes with realistic lighting, reflections, and different material properties.
The project provided experience in computer graphics, rendering algorithms, and performance optimization.
