!!! NOTE !!!

The project is not developed in this repository anymore. The source code was moved into NFEngine project: https://github.com/nfprojects/nfengine/tree/devel/Src/Engine/Raytracer

Raytracer

A side project which aims to build an efficient photorealistic software renderer.

Features

General

• Written in C++14
• Developed for Windows and Linux
• Highly optimized using SSE and AVX intrinsics
• Parsing scene description from a JSON file

Rendering

• Low discrepancy sampling (scrambled Halton sequence)
• Blue noise dithered sampling
• Adaptive rendering (using more samples in noisy image areas)
• Spectral rendering using hero wavelength method (Note: disabled by default)
• Debug rendering mode (for visualizing depth, normal vectors, material parameters, etc.)
• Camera simulation:
  • Depth of Field (circle or polygonal bokeh)
  • Barrel distortion
  • Motion blur

Geometry

• Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) used for scene and mesh traversal (two levels of BVH)
• Supported shape types: triangle meshes, sphere, box, rectangle
• Full per-object motion blur (translational and rotational)
• Both single-ray and AVX-optimized stream packet traversal

Lighting

• Supported light transport algorithms:
  • Naive Path Tracing (sampling only BSDF)
  • Path Tracing with multiple importance sampling (sampling both lights and material BSDF)
  • Bidirectional Path Tracing (with MIS)
  • Light Tracing (for debugging)
• Supported light types: point, directional, background, area (any shape)

Materials

• Physically based BSDFs: diffuse, metal, dielectric, plastic
• Cook-Torrance BSDF for specular reflection with GGX normal distribution
• Transparency and refraction
• Normal mapping support

Textures

• 2D bitmap textures
• Supports most of DXGI formats, including bit-packed formats, BC1, BC4 and BC5 block compression
• Supported file formats: BMP, DDS, EXR (thanks to https://github.com/syoyo/tinyexr library)

TODO list

• Better material model and multilayer materials (e.g. introduce Disney-like "principled" material)
• Procedural textures
• Volumetric rendering
• Optimize traversal and shading with SSE/AVX
• Port to ARM NEON