Ray Tracing

CS 500

An offline path tracer built from the intersection query up — BVH traversal, Monte Carlo integration, and the BRDFs that make the estimator converge.

5 reports, in the order they were written.

  1. 1 Ray Casting A ray caster for spheres, boxes, cylinders and triangle meshes over a BVH, with each stage checked by rendering it: nearest hit, ray distance, surface normals, and the hierarchy's speedup. 4 February 2026
  2. 2 Path Tracing A CPU path tracer with implicit and explicit light paths, Russian Roulette termination and jittered sub-pixel sampling, compared side by side from 8 to 4096 passes. 1 March 2026
  3. 3 Reflections Replacing the diffuse-only BRDF with a Cook-Torrance microfacet model (Phong NDF, Smith shadowing, Schlick Fresnel), and fixed-weight blending with the balance heuristic. 14 March 2026
  4. 4 Transmission Adding refraction to the microfacet renderer: Snell's-law transmission, Beer's-law absorption through glass, and power-heuristic MIS weights. 29 March 2026
  5. 5 Large Scale Scene Rendering with IBL Path tracing San Miguel and Lumberyard Bistro: Assimp loading with a binary scene cache, importance-sampled HDR environment light, emissive geometry as area lights, and an OIDN-denoised flythrough. 14 April 2026