JRT

(Josh’s Ray Tracer)

JRT was originally the seventh programming project for my undergraduate computer graphics course.  I enjoyed this project so much that I began tweaking and playing with it in my spare time, a process which lasted for several years. 

I have recently written a new renderer from scratch, based on all of the lessons learned from the first one, and the result is a very formidable renderer based on bounding volume hierarchies.  My goal was to make a renderer that was efficient an robust, but which was tailored specifically towards rendering pretty images for my walls.  My pet raytracer supports photon-map based global illumination, geometry instancing, plus all the usual raytracing effects (except motion blur, I only like to render still-lifes).  It is multi-threaded, and the core raytracing code makes heavy use of SSE intrinsics (borrowing heavily from the interactive raytracing literature).  

Although I haven't built a real production renderer (yet), I consider myself to be a gifted amateur when it comes to software rendering, raytracing and global illumination.

Here are some images I've generated:

Some random objects cluttering up a desk.  I'm particularly happy with the way the GI came out in this image, there's some really nice color bleeding on the lamp, the elephant, and the back wall.  The prism is a little disappointing (I need to add some dispersive refraction support).

A heptoroid made out of glass.  This object is a sculpture designed by Brent Collins and Carlo Séquin.  This particular dataset, however, came from here.

The 'Lucy' model in grace cathedral.  The environment in this image is a new light probe of grace cathedral which can be found here.

Glass teapot	Ceramic teapot	Metallic teapot

A variety of glass critters.  There is a point light inside the glass bunny which casts caustics on the walls.  Photon gathering is used for global illumination.  The wood floor uses a procedural texture that I wrote.

Caustics from those little glass globes that you can buy at IKEA.  I'm using photon gathering here too.  The scene is lit from above by a spotlight, and there is lots of scattering from the glass balls, so it takes a LOT of samples to remove all the noise.  I am VERY impressed with the performance of the Intel Centrino Duo under such stressful conditions :)

Soft shadows from a lattice structure.  This image was inspired by the works of Japanese bamboo sculptors Morigami Jin and Honda Shoryo.

A bit of algorithmic fun.  This is the minimum spanning tree of a set of random points.  The scene is lit by three spherical area lights.

This teapot is made entirely out of Stanford bunnies :)