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These shaders are my implementation of the raytracer described in the (excellent) book "Ray tracing in one weekend" and "Ray tracing: the next week"[1] by Peter Shirley (@Peter_shirley). I have tried to follow the code from his book as much as possible, but I had to make some changes to get it running in a fragment shader:

  • There are no classes (and methods) in glsl so I use structs and functions instead. Inheritance is implemented by adding a type variable to the struct and adding ugly if/else statements to the (not so overloaded) functions.
  • The scene description is procedurally implemented in the world_hit function to save memory.
  • The color function is implemented using a loop because it is not possible to have a recursive function call in glsl.
  • Only one sample per pixel per frame is calculated. Samples of all frames are added in Buffer A and averaged in the Image tab.

Besides that, I also made some other design choices. Most notably:

  • In my code ray.direction is always a unit vector so I could clean up the rest of the code by removing some implicit normalizations.
  • Cosine weighted hemisphere sampling is used for the Lambertian material.

You can find the raytracer / pathtracer in Buffer A.

= Ray tracing in one week =

= Ray tracing: the next week =

Source code

You can find (the full source of) RIOW 2.09: A Scene Testing All on Shadertoy.

Links