Photon is a spectral physically based CPU renderer written in C++. It is based on the first part of Ray Tracing in One Weekend. It supports brute force path tracing with as many threads as your computer offers and got a little bit neglected, because I switched my focus to GPU programming. However, it is a great playground and I am planning on implementing a few different rendering algorithms with it.
Originally, it was implemented on Windows, but I did not test it for quite some time there, it works on Linux though. The added google test was primarily added to get to know how to write tests with C++; so, do not get fooled into thinking this projects is greatly tested 😀
- physically based lighting with spectral dispersion at translucent surfaces
- capable of multithreading (thread count can be set at the top of main.cpp in the constructor call of RayTracer)
- shows live preview of rendering progress
- supports incremental rendering mode where samples are accumulated over time (better for preview), but this mode is slower
As this project was originally developed on Windows most dependencies are included with the project.
- SDL2
- glm
- stb
- Dear ImGui
- tinyobj