This repository is an attempt to learn the concepts and fundamentals of raytracing. The code presented here follows the assignments from the class 1001315 - COMPUTAÇÃO GRÁFICA, lectured by the professor Mario A. S. Lizier on the Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos - Campus Sorocaba. The class structure bases itself on the series of books Raytracing in One Weekend, written by Peter Shirley, Trevor David Black, and Steve Hollasch.
I divided this repository into sections where each section corresponds to one assignment. These divisions follow the labeling pattern AtividadeXX in which the XX corresponds to the assignment number.
Additionally, I also dissect the subsections with the objective of further organizing the files in this repository. They present a structure like the following:
- Headers - A folder containing the header file declarations used in the assignment.
- Test - A folder for the testing files to ensure the projected functions and classes work as wanted.
- libpng
- gtest
In a short text format, I describe the work done and project decisions made. For each assignment, there is a corresponding subsection with such descriptions.
For this assignment, I wrote a function to manage saving images on the disk. I chose primarily PNG encoding when dealing with images, thus using the libpng library. To test the save function, I represented some images in a 2D array of 256x256 and used the function save_image() to save them into .png files.
This assignment set some groundwork for the rest of the project. For convenience when dealing with vectors and matrices later, I created two vector classes (vec3 and vec4) and three matrix classes (mat2, mat3, and mat4) along with their operations.
For this assignment, I created a class called object3D that describes 3D objects, storing their important components like vertices and faces in vector structures. The objec3D constructor expects a file path as an argument that points to an OBJ file containing the description of the geometry of a given model you want to load. It only loads an object from a .obj file, being the only geometry definition format accepted.
We started playing with raytracing in this assignment. Following chapters 4, 5, and 6 from the book Ray Tracing in One Weekend, we implemented classes for the rays, camera, shapes, and others to render the first object on the screen.
At this point in the class, we learned to render basic shapes and more complex models described by a mesh of polygons. For this assignment, we deal with object materials to let the rays interact with the objects in the environment. The first ray interaction we implemented was the diffuse reflection, also called Lambertian reflection.
We continue the work on materials, adding different ways for the rays to interact. The first material is the Metal, experimenting with specular reflection following the Chapter 10. The refraction, where the ray goes through the object with a slight distortion, we coded on the Dielectric class using the Chapter 11 as a base.
Intending to apply the knowledge learned throughout the class, we rendered a short animation using raytracing. During the animation making, we tested different models to compose a scene. We composed the new scene with three. As for the camera, we chose to animate a circular movement around the glass dome with the cube inside. At last, we compiled the rendered frames into the final animation.
