Monte Carlo Ray Tracer

by Cody Thompson

Description

This is a general purpose ray tracer used to produce high quality renders of multiple scenes of ranging complexity (e.g. reflections, geometry, lights, and anti-aliasing). This ray tracer also utilizes Monte Carlo Ray Tracing to produce Globally Illuminated renders with color bleeding.

Features

• Monte Carlo Ray Tracing (Global Illumination).
• Reflections and Refractions with Schlick's (Unable to do refraction within refraction).
• Anti-aliasing (with switch to turn on and off).
• Shadows and BRDF calculations for smooth shading.
• Multiple lights.
• Binary bounding box hierarchy for large scene/geometry complexity.
• Transformations of geometry and camera.

Notes:

• Currently this only supports scenes with spheres, boxes, triangles, and planes.
• Scenes are taken in as PovRay files.

Cool Rendered Images

These pictures show the features of the Ray Tracer.

Multiple depth refraction with reflection.

This has a maximum recursion depth of 10 and runs quickly. Minimal reflections shown from Schlick's refraction algorithm.

Multiple Lights with Anti-Aliasing.

Using five differently colored lights with minimal reflection to show the backs of the spheres. Anti-aliasing was included to smooth out each sphere.

Global Illumination with High Geometric Complexity.

Global Illumination using Monte Carlo Ray Tracing. There are over 80,000 geometric objects in the scene, most of which are used to form the wave.

Future Work

• Handle refractions within refractive objects.
• Octree based bounding box hierarchy.
• Surface area sorting for forming bounding box hierarchy.

Bonus! VR Scene Using Unity and Google Cardboard

Description

This is a very simple scene made in unity. There are simple trees with leaves that move according to an added wind scene object. The robot has eyes that, when pressed, toggle the virtual reality double image (WARNING: RECOMMENDED TO NOT PRESS WHEN USING GOOGLE CARDBOARD). The scene has boxes in each top corner that, when pressed, play a particle emission to sorta simulate water. Note: The corner boxes do not toggle the particle effect, only play it.

Some VR Scene Pictures