Introduction

I was working on a CUDA ray tracer (http://cudaraytracer.blogspot.com/) as an initial stab into a GPU path tracer that I want to build. This is part of my GPU coursework at University of Pennsylvania.

 

I am using the GeForce GT 650M card with 384 Cuda cores. Specifications can be found here.

 

I will be working off my ray tracer which was built on a base code provided by the TA for the class.

 

We need to implement the following features:

• Full global illumination (including soft shadows, color bleeding, etc.) by pathtracing rays through the scene.
• Properly accumulating emittance and colors to generate a final image.
• Supersampled antialiasing.
• Parallelization by ray instead of by pixel via string compaction.
• Perfect specular reflection.

Atleast 2 of the following features also need to be implemented:

• Additional BRDF models, such as Cook-Torrance, Ward, etc. Each BRDF model may count as a separate feature. 
• Texture mapping
• Bump mapping
• Translational motion blur
• Fresnel-based Refraction, i.e. glass
• OBJ Mesh loading and rendering without KD-Tree
• Interactive camera
• Integrate an existing stackless KD-Tree library, such as CUKD (https://github.com/unvirtual/cukd)
• Depth of field

Alternatively, implementing just one of the following features can satisfy the "pick two" feature requirement, since these are correspondingly more difficult problems:

• Physically based subsurface scattering and transmission
• Implement and integrate your own stackless KD-Tree from scratch.
• Displacement mapping
• Deformational motion blur

Really excited to start off!!!