S-ray goes public

October 4, 2009 — Nuclear

S-ray is a photorealistic off-line renderer I’ve been writting on and off for the past few months. It’s basically a monte carlo ray tracer using the photon mapping algorithm to simulate global illumination effects, such as indirect diffuse lighting and caustics.

So, it’s time to open up the code and continue development in the open. The code is available only through subversion at the moment, no official “0.1” release shall be made until at least the most important outstanding bugs are fixed. However, feel free to checkout the code and play around all you want.

The project is hosted at googlecode, and you can find it at: http://code.google.com/p/sray
As always, ideas, comments, or bug fixes are more than welcome.

Posted in graphics, projects. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

s-ray: caustics through photon mapping

September 2, 2009 — Nuclear

The main feature set that I had planned for my new s-ray renderer is almost complete. The renderer is now capable of producing caustics, that is light being focused on surfaces by curved mirrors or lenses (or otherwise transmission through refractive objects).

Standard recursive ray tracing is incapable of producing caustics; instead a two-pass algorithm called photon mapping is used. Photon mapping works by tracing random photons as they leave the light sources and bounce around the scene, finally ending up on various surfaces. The second pass works just like regular ray tracing, with the difference that on every ray hit, the density of stored photons around that point is used to estimate the amount of light that has arrived there after being reflected or refracted.

Here are a couple of images produced by s-ray, showing both reflective and refractive caustics:

reflective caustics

reflective caustics
refractive caustics

refractive caustics
Posted in graphics, projects. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »
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