Vuk Radovanovic

As part of CSE 167, I had to write a CPU ray tracer from scratch. No skeleton code was provided, so the entire project had to be done by hand: command parsing, model loading, ray intersection tests, the works. The only library we were allowed to use was FreeImage.

It was far from perfect, lacking things like acceleration structures and advanced materials. I recall that the Stanford Dragon, a 50k triangle scene, took over 4 hours to render. I extended the renderer’s capabilities with OptiX in the next class, which you can read about here - you can imagine it was quite a relief when my hardware-accelerated run of the same scene managed to render in just a few seconds.

The 4-hour path trace of the Stanford Dragon.

Above is the 4-hour path trace of the Stanford Dragon. This was the largest-scale project I had ever worked on at that point in my life, and it’s something I remain proud of to this day.