Advanced Ray Tracing Showcase

This project is a significantly enhanced version of the Ray Tracing assignment (Lab 3). It demonstrates advanced rendering techniques and procedural content generation.

Features Added:

1. Procedural Textures: Implemented a checkerboard pattern for the floor plane. This is calculated on-the-fly in the shader based on the world-space intersection point, without requiring external texture files.
   • Code Location: src/blinn_phong_shading.cpp (checkerboard logic), include/Material.h (flag).
2. Complex Material Properties: The scene features a variety of materials including:
   • Mirror Surfaces: Highly reflective spheres using recursive ray tracing.
   • Metallic Surfaces: Gold-like material with high specular and low diffuse components.
   • Matte/Diffuse Surfaces: Standard Lambertian shading.
3. Custom Scene Generation: Instead of loading a simple JSON file, the scene is constructed programmatically in C++ to create a specific composition of objects and lights that highlights the rendering capabilities.
4. Text Overlay: A custom bitmap font renderer overlays the project title and course information directly onto the final image.

Acknowledgements

• Base Code: CSC317 Lab 3 (Ray Tracing) starter code.
• Libraries:
  • Eigen: For linear algebra operations.
  • json: For parsing scene files (included in base code).
• Font: A custom 5x7 bitmap font implementation was created for the text overlay.