Software Path Tracer

Initially this was a messy learning project in C++ to make some pretty images, but has since involved into a scope creep toy project.

Features

• Obj file reader for triangular meshes
• Sphere, Plane and Triangle primitives.
• XML Configuration for scene and render settings
• Octree Based BVH Acceleration Structure - a high level BVH for all objects, and a BVH for each mesh object.
• Well distributed multithreading, each thread works on a pixel at a time, and works on the next available pixel when finished.
• Has direct illumination(Next Event Estimation) and indirect illumination via random sampling.
• Uses some form of phong illumination for shading, ambient, diffuse, specular.
• Smooth shading is done for meshes using interpolation of vertex normals.
• Meshes can also be textured!

Dependencies

• zlib, libpng, png++ for handling png files (saving render / textures)
• CMarkup for defining scenes using xml files.
• CImg for displaying the render in a window.