Raytracing Part 3

The final post in this series about my ray tracer. I spent last weekend creating some black magic called a compute shader. It allows you to use your GPU to aid in calculations. In my case this came in quite handy with all these ray calculations. The GPU is optimal for calculations that can be executed completely in parallel. Fortunately, raytracing falls in this category. 

This is the first result worth looking at:

First thing to notice is that it's quite grainy. This is because there are not that many samples per pixel, only about 5. However, the (still local) Cook Torrance shading is already working as you can see on the metal-ish sphere in the back.



The main thing to notice here are the soft shadows. A small change, but 'realism' awaits. There are some incorrect results in this image, because you can see the diffuse reflection of the green box is still biased. The local shading model from two lights draws the reflecting rays in their direction, meaning this is not a totally correct result.



The box in the middle suddenly became radioactive and now emits light. The image is still biased, even the emitting box only emits towards the light sources.

Experimenting with rougher surfaces and more glossy surfaces.



The first results of refracting rays.



Perfectly refracting sphere showing the bias is indeed gone here. The grain is also gone since I actually took the time to sit back and wait for the image to converge (this image took about two minutes to converge to this state).



The same scene with different materials and a more emitting 'roof'.

Raytracing Part 2

In this post some more images of the continuing project on raytracing. First of all, I found out that the bounding spheres were way too big, and a big performance hit on my ray tracing project. Instead of spheres I now calculate bounding boxes around all the triangles in the model and test with these instead of the spheres. All in all, this improvement alone did not speed up things enough. By looking at my quickly made octree, I found some fatal flaws rendering the octree quite worthless. All of the triangles were stored in the topmost bounding box instead of the leaves as they should be.

This image shows the octree of the Stanford dragon and 2 teapots:



After I got all this working I was quite amazed by the quick rendering times. It took almost half the time as before, making it possible to even render this huge dragon:





The next image shows some reflections in the windows and the body of the car:



Of course, I could never stop here. So why not add some refraction as well:



By combining the result of reflections and refraction:



Now, these images are already quite fancy. However, there is still a lot of work to do. The following image shows a sneak peak of the next and final part of this raytracing series. By tracing multiple rays within a pixel area we have more information about the color. Combining this with a nice gaussian function over multiple pixels I have created a nice anti-aliasing function:



In the next part I will show results of a distributed raytracer slowly converging towards rendering an image with global illumination effects.

Raytracing Part 1

This post shows the progress for an assignment I'm currently creating for a university course. It's about creating a raytracer starting from scratch. I chose to implement it using SharpDX. I first started by creating a standard renderer, which draws triangles on the GPU using DirectX. After I could load in simple objects and draw them on the screen, I created a basic raytracer.

First I had to convert the loaded models in SharpDX to triangles I could actually use to trace. After some work I finally got some results and started taking screenshots. Hence the result so far in graphical representation:

The model drawn with the basic effect



Silhouette by raytracing the boundary. The gray area is the bounding sphere (which is a little off scale).



Material loading, getting the 'correct' colors for the car. The light color interfered here, thats why the colors are still a little off.



I forgot to order the triangles by depth! What a mess..



After ordering the triangles



Blinn-phong shading.



More lights! Shadows!



Soft shading, taking the average of three normals for each point on a triangle.



Our car is back! However some normals are still incorrect, you can see headlights missing.



Soft Shadows! Sending 20 rays from every point to the lightsource to see if we have shadow. The correct normals have been put in.


Blinn-Phong shading back in the picture. The car looks really metallic now:

There are still some strange 'light artifacts' on the floor and the car window. More updates will be in the next post.