Retro Ray Tracer

Originally published December 2016 on Medium

I recently completed University of Waterloo’s Introduction to Computer Graphics Course. If you’re a present or future computer science student at Waterloo: This was one of the most interesting and challenging courses I’ve taken at the University; definitely check it out if you can (especially if it’s being taught by the wonderful Craig Kaplan). Fair warning: The work load is quite high.

The course work consists of four assignments covering OpenGL basics, the graphics pipeline, hierarchical modelling, and ray tracing, as well as a final project. For the project, I chose to extend my ray tracer from the fourth assignment with some extra features. I cover the most interesting five here.

1. Solid Textures

Also known as procedurally-generated textures, these are defined as functions that take a coordinate in 3D space and return a colour. I implemented two textures with this technique, checkers and marble.

For marble, I use a deterministic noise-generation function with turbulence and bilinear interpolation for smoothing. I noticed that I get a cool pixelated effect when smoothing is disabled. I apply this effect in my final scene.

2. Soft Shadows

I define lights as triangle meshes and cast multiple shadow rays at random points on the mesh. A portion of the shadow rays intersect with other objects in the scene, meaning the surface is partially lit and appears increasingly darker.

One area light is defined on the ceiling in the example above. I used 256 samples per light.

3. Depth of Field

Much like photographic depth of field, depth of field here is simulated by defining a finite-width aperture. For each pixel, the position of the camera is sampled at random locations on a disk parallel to a user-defined focal plane in the scene. The camera always points at a specific point on the focal plane, so items close to the plane are always in focus.

Check out the original Distributed Ray Tracing paper by Cook, Porter, and Carpenter for more details about ray tracing depth of field and soft shadows.

4. Feature Lines

This is implemented with the technique developed by Choudhury and Parker in their paper Ray Tracing NPR-Style Feature Lines. It makes some scenes look like comic book drawings.

5. Voxel Mode

A voxel is basically a large, 3D pixel. When voxel mode is enabled, any scene is approximated with fixed-size cubes. Used appropriately, this produces scenes akin to old-school 8-bit video games.

The idea for this feature came from this wonderful piece by Matej ‘Retro’ Jan. My final scene was very much inspired by the referenced artwork.

Putting it all together

Here’s the final demo scene I created with the above features.

Here’s what this looked like before voxelization. The rendering on the right has depth of field enabled.

Other features I implemented

Huge thanks to Professor Kaplan for pointing me in the right direction when I was first getting started, as well as to the rest of the CS 488 teaching staff for being generally awesome. Huger thanks to my classmates Adam and Stefanie, I would be completely lost without your emotional support!