Ray-tracing from scratch

One of the modules I took in third year was Computer Graphics, that’s not 3D modelling and stuff (that would be Computer Generated Imagery) - it’s about how rendering actually works.

The main piece of assessment is to develop a rasterizing/ray-tracing 3D renderer in C++, we’re only given three functions to accomplish this:

• setPixelColour(int x, int y, int colour) where colour is a packed ARGB int.
• clearPixels()
• renderFrame()

We were then marked by submitting a 15 second demo render/ident

Some of the features you might be able to spot:

• Refraction
• Mirrors
• Metals
• Texture Mapping
• Normal Mapping
• Environment Mapping
• Soft Shadows
• Axis-aligned collisions and rigid-body physics
• Animation
• Flat, Gouraud, and Phong shading

Some of the features you won’t be able to see:

• Culling of occluded triangles before rendering
• On-screen menu to control render parameters
• Loading of mtl and obj files
• Custom animation storage format