Holiday Projects

Over the new year’s break I’ve been working on a few projects – it’s been a while since I had a chance to get into writing some code for a fun project.

I’m still working on another holiday project – so this might be a bit short on deep technical details – but here’s some of what I’ve been doing.

Raytracer

One project I set out to build was a software raytracer. Having already done some work with 3D graphics (see other posts on this blog), it seemed like an interesting project to take on to see the differences between rasterization and tracing. The vast majority of rendering code I’ve written has been for OpenGL rasterization so it was certainly a change in mental paradigm.

It was fascinating to be able to build scenes with mirrors, reflective surfaces, shadows… coming from rasterization, it felt like “cheating” to just add another light to the scene, or to add a pair of mirrors and have the infinite mirror effect just work.

A demo raytraced scene with a pair of mirrors creating an infinite mirror effect.

I have a physically-based rendering demo in my 3D game engine source tree that I tried to replicate in the raytracer:

Raytracing vs Rasterized physically based rendering demo. The raytracer is a little noisy – not nearly enough samples (but I was running it realtime).

I had a lot of fun writing the raytracer and for the most part I was able to get it up and running over a weekend.

Physically-Based Rendering

For a long time I’ve been using physically-based rendering in my 3D engine. Over the break I was able to dig into it a little more and fix a number of bugs across the implementation.

One such bug was an inversion of parameters when generating a lookup table texture for the image-based lighting specular calculations. I flipped parameters causing the lookups to return incorrect data, creating inaccurate scenes.

Comparing a buggy BRDF lookup table generation to the fixed variant.

I also spent a lot of time rewriting the equations. I made a fundamental error years ago when I first write the physically-based rendering shaders. The rendering integral was implemented as an equation and never ever worked the way I expected, so I jammed factors and such around until it kind of worked. Working on the raytracer helped me realize it’s an integral – because using mutiple rays per pixel in a raytracer completes a Monte Carlo estimation of the integral – and so I made sure everything was up-to-date in source control and rewrote the shaders.