A simple CPU path tracer created as part of the Chaos Ray Tracing course.
- Equal Splitting: Simple approach dividing space into equal parts.
- Middle Splitting: Divides space at the midpoint of the geometry.
- SAH (Surface Area Heuristic) Splitting: Advanced technique that minimizes the expected cost of traversing the BVH. Although binning for faster SAH builds was considered, other features took priority.
- Efficiently simulates the reflection of light from diffuse surfaces by sampling according to a cosine distribution, which more accurately represents the physical properties of diffuse reflection.
- Essential for rendering scenes like the classical Cornell Box, where a rectangular light source on the ceiling needs to be accurately sampled, especially at low sample counts.
- Consideration was given to implementing a power light sampler, but it was deemed unnecessary for the current scenes.
- Combines samples from the BSDF (Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function) and the emissive light sources to reduce variance and produce cleaner images with fewer samples.
To run the path tracer, pass the path to a scene file (with a .crtscene extension) as a command line argument. Example scene files can be found in the ChaosPathTracer/scenes directory.