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.

< cpu2.jpg > cpu3.jpg
< cpu4.jpg > < cpu10. jpg >




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.

< gpu1.jpg >