Build a Ray Tracer (Graphics) from Scratch

learn the fundamentals of ray tracing from scratch, contrast true light simulation with emulation, and implement triangle and sphere primitives, area lights, and color-driven shadows while addressing performance.

Set up an empty C++ project, configure GLM and the simple fast media library, and build a windowed hello program to render a blank image incrementally.

Implement the triangle primitive as the building block for the ray tracer, compute its normal and intersection, and render a floor composed of triangles.

Add a sphere object to the ray tracer, implement its hit function using the quadratic discriminant to find intersections, compute normals, and render with basic lighting.

Learn to implement direct lighting in a ray tracer using Monte Carlo path tracing, sampling many rays, handling emissive light sources, and modulating brightness for realistic shadows.

Implement indirect lighting by recursively tracing rays to simulate bounced light and softer shadows, using random directions, normals, dot products, and color attenuation to achieve realism.

Create a Cornell box scene by adding a ceiling and red left wall and green right wall, showing color bleed and bloom while rendering with a thousand samples for realism.

This final lecture explains current issues with implementing transparent and metal like materials, postpones them for now, and promises future additions, while highlighting high-quality renders and a diffuse lighting focus.