This is an archive of my Twitter posts from last year recording the development of the path tracer I wrote for my Masters project.
Ray tracing a red sphere. OK, it doesn’t look much like a sphere yet, but over the next few days we’ll get there!
Directly visualising normal vectors with “shading normals”.
Anti-aliasing vs no antialiasing. (AA with 50 samples per pixel and random jittering).
Amazingly enough, all it takes is a few lines of code to get diffuse global illumination using the sky as the light.
Diffuse and perfect mirror spheres. 1000 samples per pixel path tracing with full global illumination.
Adding coloured transparency with Fresnel reflection:
Added depth of field:
A (gratuitously path-traced) visualisation of the first three bands of spherical harmonics.
After a whole day of debugging spherical coordinates, my path-tracer now has image-based lighting.
More playing around with image based lighting – the square light is actually a single pixel of a 4×4 pixel env map.
Reconstruction of an environment map from spherical harmonics using higher and higher bands of coefficients.
Constructing a final render from intermediates renders of an environment map projected into spherical harmonics.
Demo video:
Coding Is Magic 