Back again with a showcase of my new raytracer called Luz, simply meaning “light” in Spanish 🙂
It currently only supports CPU rendering BUT, with the additional options of tiled rendering and multithreading. I have plans for this summer vacation to integrate last year’s Vulkan backend to allow for the more efficient GPU rendering alternative, but there’s still some fundamental work left on the GUI before I’ll take that step.
Mesh intersection is also further optimized using bounding volume hierarchies, in which I started off with a naive implementation based on the book “An Introduction to Raytracing”. It’s a bit dated but most of the math is still relevant to this day and essentially all modern raytracing builds upon the practices discussed in this book. Highly recommended!
The goal of the tool is to make it easier for myself to develop new raytracing features and also speed up the learning process by making the entire experience more interactive – which was exactly what I was lacking in the Vulkan raytracer prototype. With the help of Luz, I might hopefully be able to take on more challenging tasks that was beyond my reach only a year ago.
There’s also been plenty of mistakes along the way as well for both the CPU and GPU approach, even for some of the minor image corrections. I hope to find the time to discuss this in some future posts when I can compile my notes into something that’s actually readable along with the source code which will be uploaded to Github when the project has matured a bit.
Until then, take care and have a wonderful summer!
Fredrik Linde 