Ray Tracing Sandbox

Introduction and motivation

The majority of the baseline code is taken from the tutorial series “Ray Tracing in One Weekend” by Peter Shirley. The github repo for his projects can be found at https://github.com/RayTracing/raytracing.github.io/ and has be an invaluable resource for learning about the traditional methods used in computer graphics rendering methods.

I created this sandbox project to learn about computer graphics rendering techniques used in ray tracing as I have always been amazed at the ever increasing complexity of computer visual effects that are implemented in movies and tv shows.

Future Work

I plan on using the ray-tracing sandbox to explore optimization techniques that move beyond brute force methods of simple ray-object intersections of every object in the virtual environment. I plan on implemented map based methods such as K-D trees to speed up the rendering process. I also plan on expanding the library of primitives past simple objects (e.g. spheres and cubes) to the widely used triangle objects that composed STL files and NURBS objects, both of which are some of the most common representation of computer-aided designs.

More posts to come!