Following light through a scene
Weekend Raytracer is a small CPU renderer built as a hands-on way to understand the fundamentals behind physically based rendering.
The renderer sends rays from a configurable camera into a scene, finds their intersections with geometry, and recursively follows scattered rays to accumulate emitted and reflected light. Multiple samples per pixel reduce noise and produce soft, progressively refined images.
What it implements
- Lambertian diffuse, metallic, dielectric, and emissive materials
- Solid-color, checkerboard, and image textures
- Recursive ray scattering and emitted light
- Anti-aliasing through multi-sample rendering
- Axis-aligned bounding boxes
- A bounding volume hierarchy for faster intersection testing
- A configurable perspective camera
The project is intentionally compact. Its value is in making the rendering equation tangible: every material, ray intersection, and acceleration structure has a visible effect on the final image.