Path tracer that renders photorealistic images
To render an image, simply provide an XML file describing the scene (lighting, materials, meshes, camera, renderer, etc.) as input. There are example XML files in the scene directory.
// Build project
$ ant
// Render an image using an input XML file
$ java -cp carbine.jar ray.ParaRayTracer scene/cbox-global.xmlIn addition to the test Cornell box scenes (and a sphere rendering test), I have created two additional "creative" scenes.
The first scene is dragon.xml which has the Cornell dragon placed in an empty Cornell box with two spheres of light for illumination. The .obj files (and converted .msh equivalents) are included in the scene directory.
The second scene is chess.xml which has a chessboard and chess pieces placed in a Cornell box. The only light in the scene is the square ceiling light.
There are four implemented renderers: ambient occlusion, direct illumination, brute force (global illumination) path tracing, and Russian roulette path tracing. All of the renderers have been fully-implemented.
Note: My implementation of rayRadianceRecursive() and gatherIllumination() for the brute force path tracer (and the Russian roulette path tracer) do not use mutual recursion. Instead, the recursive computation of reflected radiance is computed entirely in gatherIllumination().
Overall, the generated renders provide seemingly accurate results. The only anomaly I encountered was that the Russian roulette path tracer appears to add quite a bit of noise to the rendered image when compared to the brute force global illumination method. I suspect that this comes from the increased variance in the computed pixel samples due to the random probability that a recursive ray reflection gets terminated. The resulting Russian roulette renders would likely look much smoother given a higher number of samples per pixel.