Work Log by Kevin Beason

Latest personal graphics developments

smallpt: Global Illumination in 99 lines of C++

Finally releasing a little project I’ve been working on. A small project, although I spent an insane amount of time tweaking it. My hope is that it can serve as a concise reference to anyone wondering what’s involved in a basic global illumination renderer. Honestly, since I don’t explain the concepts or the shortcuts used, and the code is ugly in some places, I don’t know how valuable it will be to a someone just entering the field. A basic renderer can be kicked out in less than a day, perhaps a concrete working example like this can fill in any missing details for someone just starting off.

smallpt: Global Illumination in 99 lines of C++

1 comment

1 Comment so far

  1. Jing November 17th, 2008 2:17 pm

    Cool. 🙂

    Pane inspired me to make a ray tracer for my undergrad graphics course. I didn’t add global illumination, but I did make a short animation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJHqTr58CE). Now I need to look at lighting and material for my grad study and I think this piece of code is a very good crash course for global illumination.

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