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Hello everyone! Welcome to my blog which will keep me company throughout the journey of developing a ray tracer for CENG795 - Special Topics: Advanced Ray Tracing course. Stay tuned for the updates!

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Part 3: Transformations, Instancing, Multisampling & Distribution

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For the third part, a lot of new features are introduced to the ray tracer. 1. Transformations In order to implement transformations, firstly I implemented a Matrix4f class which is able to support basic matrix operations such as inverse, transpose, multiplication with another matrix or a vector etc. Three types of transformations which are Translation , Rotation and Scaling are supported in this new version of the ray tracer. While parsing the scene, final Transformation Matrices are stored for each object, which will be used for transforming Rays , Hits and BoundingBoxes later. For meshes, the transformation matrix is stored only for the main mesh object, not for all of its children triangles. In addition, for transforming bounding boxes, transformations are applied to all 8 corners of the bounding box and the new bounding box is computed based on these new corners, instead of applying the transformations directly to the min and max corners. To intersect rays with the transformed...
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Part 2: Recursive Ray Tracing & Bounding Volume Hierarchy

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For the second part of the ray tracer, two new features are added to my basic ray tracer: 1. Recursive Ray Tracing ( Reflection & Refraction ) 2. Bounding Volume Hierarchy Besides these core features, the new ray tracer also supports the following: 1. PLY File Parsing As the core ray tracer is improved, it will be able to deal with more and more complicated scenes and larger meshes. Since most of these advanced scenes are represented using PLY files, this version of the ray tracer also provides support for PLY file format. For parsing PLY files, an external library called hapPLY is utilized. 2. LookAt Camera In the previous version, only the simple camera model where the image plane is represented by left, right, top and bottom parameters was supported. With this version, the ray tracer also supports LookAt Camera model where image plane is described by the angle called fovy and it is assumed that the image plane is centered with respect to the camera position. While parsing the...
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Part 5: HDR Imaging & Advanced Lighting

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For the fifth part of the ray tracer, the following features are implemented: 1. HDR Imaging and Tonemapping Until now, only PNG format was supported for saving rendered scenes. RGB values obtained by shading calculations are fractional and they are not limited to any range. However, for saving them in PNG format, the values were being clamped to 0-255 range and converted to integers, which results in removing a considerable amount of details from the image. With HDR imaging , RGB values are no longer clamped and they can be represented with floating points by saving the scenes in EXR format. The RGB values obtained from ray tracing can directly be used for HDR images, but they have to be tonemapped to be saved in PNG format. For tonemapping, Photographic Tonemapping by Reinhard (global operator) is implemented. With the HDR imaging support, the ray tracer is also able to use HDR texture images in EXR format. In order to read HDR images, tinyexr is used, while for writing HDR images ...
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