Vex Pathtracer

[DonRomano]

Hey guys, 

I started making a very simple pathtracer with vex in sopland. I'll add basic reflection and refraction, and keep it very simple as it is made as an "educational tool" to help students understand how pathtracing works under the hood. Once I'll have finish I'll share the file here if some of you are interested.

I added an "animation" in which we can see the different paths a ray takes : the primary path (in red/blue in the video), the next event estimation path (in black/yellow), and the diffuse bounces (in magenta). I'll also add the next event estimation for the diffuse bounces, and of course when it will be implemented, reflection and refraction paths.

Here's a little video of the animation, and a very non-converged render

https://streamable.com/37kxua

(I think I have a bug in the global illumination I'll fix it tomorrow).

 

Cheers,

Edited April 22, 2021 by DonRomano

[DonRomano]

Got time today to add reflection and refraction, I even got caustics with a little trick !

Now time to adjust the animation to capture reflection/refraction rays and I'll call this done.

 

Cheers,

[DonRomano]

Go a bit of time yesterday and this morning so I rewrote the whole thing from scratch, with fresnel blend for glass (to get both reflection and refraction), and I fixed a few bugs in the gi. I need to fix the animation of the rays now, and it should be good. I might add antialiasing too to get smoother renders (and maybe add a simple photon mapping help to caustics because they are still very noisy).

 

 

I attached the file though it's not finished (in case you want to also test). I need to add more comments and notes to help understand what's going on, and once everything's fine I'll share the "final" file. You need to include the "raytracer.h" file in a directory defined in the HOUDINI_VEX_PATH in houdini.env.

raytracer.hipnc   raytracer.h

 

Cheers,