COMS 336 Renderer

Build and Run

Requires GCC (supporting C++11 or newer) and Make. Developed on Windows 11 using MSYS2, but presumably will work on Linux/Mac too.

make all
./build/render

Software Requirements

• Software: gcc, g++ supporting C++11 or newer, Python 3.11+
• Documentation: MiKTeX or something that provides pdflatex and LaTeX packages.

Makefile Targets

• setup: Sets up the project.
• docs: Compiles the documentation.
• all: Compiles and links the embedded software and runs stack analysis
• compiledb: Generates Clang-style compile_commands.json that improves VSCode's autocompletion using Python compiledb.
• clean: Clean the build environment.

Third Party Libraries (/lib)

• nlohmann's JSON parsing library
• TinyOBJLoader
  • RapidOBJ is a newer, faster version of TinyOBJLoader but it doesn't support the Windows/MSYS combo. It's not Windows or Linux so it doesn't know what to do
• stb, specifically stb_image.h
  • CImg is more powerful but it needs ImageMagick to load anything other than PPM files. I started there but had to switch over.

Future Improvements

• Potential idea: Refactor json files into objects list and index list. Could allow more reusability

Tasks

• A camera with configurable position, orientation, and field of view
• Anti-aliasing
• Ray/sphere intersections
• Ray/triangle intersections
• The ability to load textures (file format(s) of your choice; may use third-party libraries) - Done through tinyobjloader
• Textured spheres and triangles - Texture loading done through stb_image.h
• The ability to load and render triangle meshes (file format(s) of your choice; may use third-party libraries for loading) - Done through tinyobjloader
• A spatial subdivision acceleration structure of your choice - Done with bounding volume hierarchy
• Specular, diffuse, and dielectric materials (per first volume of Ray Tracing in One Weekend series)
• Emissive materials (lights)

Required extras, at least 25 pts (C-):

• Object instancing: being able to copy/rescale/rotate the same object throughout the scene (10) - Done with scene JSON and preventing multiple loads of the same OBJ file.
• Quads (10)
• Parallelization (10)

Non required extras:

• High dynamic range images (10)
• Volume rendering (smoke, clouds, etc.) (10)
• Quadrics (15)
• Spectral rendering (30)
• BRDF materials (Bi-directional reflectance distribution functions) (30)
• Subsurface scattering (BSSRDFs) (30)
• Motion blur (10)
• Defocus blur/depth of field (10)
• Perlin noise (10)
• Cube maps (15)
• Importance sampling (15)
• Normal interpolation (smooth shading) (5)
• Hybrid rendering with a GPU (OpenGL/DirectX + ray tracing) (20)
• GPU acceleration (GPU computing w/ e.g., CUDA) (20)
• Adaptive sampling (15)