Alex Karpenko

One of the assignments that I worked on during undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto was a raytracer, which I wrote for a 4th year computer graphics course. My raytracer took first place at the Fall 2006 Wooden Monkey competition. The prize: fame, glory, and a wooden monkey

Some features of the raytracer are:

1. CSGs, Arbitrary Polygonal Objects (loaded from wavefront obj files)
2. Normals are phong interpolated for smooth shading
3. Texture mapping with bilinear interpolation. Can be applied to any channel of phong model, as well as luminosity
4. Reflections and refractions
5. Diffuse (blurry) reflections and refractions (diffusivity can be set)
6. Point lights with shadows
7. Area lights: Polygonal geometry can serve as an area light. Texture can be applied to the luminosity channel of the  geometry; this way the mesh can cast light with varying color and intensity over its surface.

The images below show how these features can be applied to a scene in order to enhance its visual appearance:

Finally, the images below combine the features of the raytracer. These images were submitted to the Wooden Monkey competition and took first place. In order to tune the lighting and various other parameters, thumbnail-sized images were rendered. Rendering times for full resolution images were about 2 hours each.

Tags: raytracer, rendering