CPU Ray Tracing
Me and Nisha Jain, a CS Phd student, built a recursive CPU ray tracer
from ground zero, with Kd-tree as our acceleration data structure and
additional support for quadrics and affine transformed objects. It was
our first ever attempt at ray tracing. Following are a few screen
shots.
GPU Ray Tracing
As we immensely enjoyed the CPU ray tracing work, we decided to take it
further to GPU ray tracing. Again, the GPU ray-tracer was built from
scratch. However, on account of shortage of time we could not fully
incorporate Kd-tree data structure into it. Even without an
acceleration data structure, we could get a 4 fps for reasonably
complicated scenes. Large fraction of the implementation for the
algorithm was written as a set of GLSL fragment shaders.