pathtracer

This is a basic pathtracer I wrote in C99 as an exercise. It aims at keeping things simple while maintaining good performance (both in terms of algorithms and memory/cache management).

Features

• Basic Shapes : spheres, bounded and unbounded planes, triangle meshes
• BVH acceleration for meshes, with surface area heuristic and reasonably fast build times (about 2s for 1M tris on a single Ryzen 5 3600 core)
• Basic Materials : pure lambertian, pure reflection
• Global illumination
• Cosine-weighted and uniform sampling
• Multi-threaded rendering with POSIX threads

To do :

• Faster BVH build times & smarter heuristics
• Smarter sampling schemes (Multiple Importance Sampling, bidirectionnal pathtracing, Metropolis Light Transport)
• More interesting BSDFs (glass, microfacet models, BSDF mixes)
• Scene-wide BVHs
• Better data- and task- parallelism (SIMD, maybe OpenCL?)
• User friendliness (scene file specification, interactive interface)
• General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience

Building

The only dependencies are SDL2, for simple cross-platform window management, and stb_image (included in the source) for writing image files.

git clone https://github.com/Toctave/pathtracer.git
cd pathtracer
make

Usage

bin/pathtracer [-w <image width>] [-h <image height>] [-s <max samples>] [-t <max render time (s)>] [-o <output file>]

Gallery